Commentaryhttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary
Fri, 09 Dec 2016 13:38:09 +0000CFIF CMSen-gbDid Democrats Learn Anything From Their Attack on the Filibuster? http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3371-did-democrats-learn-anything-from-their-attack-on-the-filibuster-
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3371-did-democrats-learn-anything-from-their-attack-on-the-filibuster-I won't lie. After reading the CNN piece titled "Senate Dems, powerless to stop Trump nominees, regret 'nuclear option' power play," I experienced some deeply satisfying schadenfreude. Feel free keep President Barack Obama, Sen. Harry Reid and those who implored Senate Democrats to blow up the filibuster a few years ago in your thoughts as President-elect Donald Trump names his Cabinet and judges. But be sure to remember how recklessness begets recklessness in Washington, D.C.

"I do regret that," Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, a Democrat who voted to weaken the filibuster three years ago, tells CNN. "I frankly think many of us will regret that in this Congress because it would have been a terrific speed bump, potential emergency brake, to have in our system to slow down nominees."

It always was a terrific speed bump, senator. One of the reasons we value tradition, norms and process is that we don't know what the future holds. But, you'll note, these Democrats don't regret their vote for majoritarianism or power grabs. They regret that Trump (and it would be the same for Mitt Romney or any moderate Republican, for that matter) will now be able to operate under the rules they set for themselves.

It's worth remembering that Democrats didn't use a parliamentary procedure to change the rules so that federal judicial nominees and executive-office appointments can move to confirmation votes with a simple majority for some grand ideological purpose. They did it for short-term political gains that no one will remember. Does any Democrat believe helping Obama name some left-wing populists to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which didn't even exist until 2011) and the National Labor Relations Board was worth it?

Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., another leading proponent of destroying checks and balances, charged at the time that without the nuclear option Republicans were "going to disable" the executive branch. "It's come into a realm where it's just unacceptable because if the executive branch can't function, then the nation can't respond to the big challenges it faces," he explained. He seemed to be under the impression that presidents make laws — or maybe just liberal presidents.

The liberal punditry hammered the filibuster back then the same way it's hammering the Electoral College today. In 2010, Paul Krugman wrote a column in The New York Times claiming that the filibuster would destroy America.

I do not exaggerate. He wrote: "We've always known that America's reign as the world's greatest nation would eventually end. But most of us imagined that our downfall, when it came, would be something grand and tragic. What we're getting instead is less a tragedy than a deadly farce."

The idea that Democrats hadn't been able to function was a myth. Obama, supposedly powerless to face America's "big challenges," had already passed a nearly trillion-dollar stimulus, a restructuring of the entire health care system and a tangled overhaul of financial regulation. The president also appointed two wholly liberal Supreme Court justices with no meaningful opposition.

The American people then said, "That's enough." For Merkley, Krugman, Coons, Reid and others, that wouldn't do.

When Reid's party was in the minority, he warned that weakening the Senate filibuster would "destroy the very checks and balances our Founding Fathers put in place to prevent absolute power by any one branch of government." He was right. With his party's attainment of a Senate majority, Reid's reverence for the Founding Fathers rapidly faded, so much so that he used the nuclear option to eliminate the filibuster from some Senate debates.

As a practical matter, these changes will likely never be reversed. What kind of majority is going to restore the filibuster to its opponents? What kind of majority wouldn't use the same process to roll back the previous Senate's abuses? (And the latter makes complete sense.) After all, the Chris Coons of the world will never be courageous enough to stand for process and stability over partisanship gain. In a Republican environment where winning itself is the ideology, it becomes even less likely.

Although each party detests the filibuster when it is in power, progressives hold an enduring contempt for it because they hold an enduring contempt for federalism in general. Even today, some liberals are trying to figure out ways to work Senate procedure to put Chief Judge Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court. As if Republicans wouldn't then simply turn around and load the court themselves. This kind of arms race sets dangerous precedents. It'd be nice if the nation realized it.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+DavidHarsanyi@gmail.com (David Harsanyi)State of AffairsFri, 09 Dec 2016 05:07:59 +0000Obesity, Fatty Foods, Death and Sciencehttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3372-obesity-fatty-foods-death-and-science
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3372-obesity-fatty-foods-death-and-scienceSomething is killing us — beyond the fact that life itself is a terminal condition. This week brought news that the U.S. mortality rate overall has risen slightly since 2014. "It's a definite milestone in the wrong direction, and the concern a lot of us have is that it reflects largely the approximately three-decade-long epidemic of obesity," Stephen Sidney, a California research scientist, told The Wall Street Journal. Death rates rose for eight of the 10 leading causes, including heart disease, stroke, chronic respiratory disease, injuries (including drug overdoses), diabetes, kidney disease, Alzheimer's disease and suicide. Cancer death rates continue to decline, and influenza deaths were unchanged. The uptick in deaths means that life expectancy rates for babies born today have dropped a bit.

For something as multifactorial as overall death rates, a certain modesty is necessary in interpreting the data and/or offering hypotheses. I have my favorite suspicion, and I freely acknowledge that it's a hunch. A large number of Americans are living alone (27 percent in 2014, compared with 13 percent in 1960) and becoming alienated from community, church, and neighborhood groups (the so-called mediating institutions of society). A 2010 AARP survey found that one third of adults over 45 years old reported that they were chronically lonely, whereas only 20 percent said the same a decade earlier. Not everyone who lives alone is lonely, and some people who live with others are, but the rise of loneliness is real and has measurable health effects.

As Judith Shulevitz explained in The Atlantic:

"Psychobiologists can now show that loneliness sends misleading hormonal signals, rejiggers the molecules on genes that govern behavior, and wrenches a slew of other systems out of whack. They have proved that long-lasting loneliness not only makes you sick; it can kill you. Emotional isolation is ranked as high a risk factor for mortality as smoking."

A large retrospective study published earlier this year found that isolated individuals had a 32 percent higher risk for stroke and a 29 percent higher risk of heart disease. Many studies have shown that married people (particularly men) are less likely to die from post-surgical complications, cancer, heart disease and other causes.

Last year, the wife/husband team of Anne Case and Angus Deaton made headlines with a study showing something that had not been seen for many decades in the United States: The death rate for non-Hispanic whites between 45 and 54 years old in the United States was actually ticking up. The mortality rates for African-Americans, Hispanics and other age cohorts were continuing a downward trend that had been steady and steep for decades (or centuries, by some measures). Even more disturbing, the Case/Deaton study suggested that these white Americans were dying not of heart disease or cancer (though some do, of course) but of diseases that imply a sickness of spirit as much as of body — suicide, drug overdoses and cirrhosis of the liver. This could be a signal of the declining economic prospects of lower-skilled workers, or it could be a symptom of the loneliness and despair that the breakdown of families has left in its wake.

But something else may be at work as well. This week, the British Medical Journal, after careful consideration, rebuffed the efforts of the Center for Science in the Public Interest to force the journal to retract an article by Nina Teicholz. She is the author of "The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet," a great debunking of standard nutritional advice. In what has been dubbed "the battle of butter," Teicholz assails the U.S. Dietary Guidelines, which have (informally since the 1960s and officially since 1980) urged Americans to eat less fat and more carbohydrates (see: the food pyramid). Teicholz argues, and the British Medical Journal confirms, that the "strong" link between consumption of saturated fat and heart disease is not supported by the evidence. Meanwhile, assiduously eliminating fat from the diet has caused Americans to substitute processed carbohydrates such as grains, which are less filling than fat and may lead to obesity. It is notable that as Americans have followed the dietary guidelines, obesity has skyrocketed. And with obesity come the killers — heart disease, cancer and diabetes.

Teicholz's careful review of the origins of the fat/heart-disease orthodoxy is a case study in why skepticism of experts is, well, healthy. This is not to suggest that we abandon the scientific method or give the rumor Uncle Fred sends on Facebook the same weight as an article in Nature. It is an argument for remembering that the term "settled science" is an oxymoron.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+MonaCharen@gmail.com (Mona Charen)State of AffairsFri, 09 Dec 2016 05:01:29 +0000Obama Apparently Wasn't on "The Right Side of History" After Allhttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3369-obama-apparently-wasnt-on-qthe-right-side-of-historyq-after-all
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3369-obama-apparently-wasnt-on-qthe-right-side-of-historyq-after-allSince the first days of his presidency, Barack Obama has cast himself as occupying "the right side of history" and exploited Martin Luther King, Jr.'s phrase that, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

Now in the final days of that presidency, even Obama must be confronting the distressing possibility that the phrase is either an empty one, or alternatively that the arc actually bent against him and marooned him on the wrong side of history.

In objective historical terms, of course, the concept of the universe's moral arc bending toward justice is of dubious merit. After all, under that theory modern times should presumably have manifested diminishing injustice.

But has that proven true? The 20th century stands unrivaled as the most murderous in human history. Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot and Fidel Castro alone slaughtered on such a scale that accurately estimating the deaths for which they're directly responsible within the tens of millions remains impossible.

It's worth noting that none of those murderous tyrants employed industrial modernity toward reducing government's reach, expanding individual freedom or life, liberty and pursuit of happiness as our Founding Fathers envisioned. Each of them instead sought to maximize government control over human beings and stifle their freedoms. That fact offers a superior historical lesson to vague notions of a "right side of history."

Assuming the merit of the concept for purposes of argument, however, it has treated Obama unkindly.

As he now surveys his surroundings, Obama sees an opposition Republican party dominating America at the federal, state and local levels to a degree unseen since the 1920s. For eight years he demonized Republicans and questioned their very morality, hoping to convince the electorate that they're unfit to govern. But instead of vanquishing Republicans, he himself stands vanquished. That dissonance between Obama's understanding of "the arc of the moral universe" and the reality he sees after nearly a decade in the White House must torment him in his private thoughts.

And what meaning must Obama glean from the stunning election of his longtime nemesis Donald Trump? Just a short time ago, Trump sat captive to Obama's withering mockery at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner. Today, Obama's antithesis prepares to usher him out the door.

Or consider his presidency's signature "achievement," ObamaCare. When he signed that legislation in March 2010, the American public opposed it by a polling average of 50.3% to 40.3%. Six years later, opposition to the law maintains the same 10% differential over support.

Beyond ObamaCare's unpopularity, the law has suffered constant logistical failures and it even earned Obama the "Lie of the Year" for assuring us that if we liked our insurance plan or doctor, we could keep them under ObamaCare. As a result, repeal and replacement stands atop the agenda of the incoming Trump Administration. It has confirmed the folly of big government, not the merits.

The arc of the moral universe simply did not bend in the way Obama presumed.

Consider also climate change hysteria, another one of the Obama presidency's central agenda items. Perhaps no contemporary moral crusade better typifies the "arc of the moral universe is long" mantra, given its conveniently distant time horizons. The well-subsidized anthropogenic global warming industry intentionally cast its projections into faraway years and decades, confident that by the time the actual evidence arrives, it will be too late to matter.

But we're now over a quarter-century into the synthetic global warming scare, and temperature projection models have been proven almost uniformly overhyped. Whereas in 2005 we were instructed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina that man-caused global warming would bring an increase in similar disasters, the U.S. has now gone a record eleven years without a major-category hurricane.

The arc of the moral universe may be long, but not long enough to conceal climate alarmists' failures.

The broader reality is that platitudes like "the right side of history" are tools typically employed by the statist political left to rationalize dominion over the "little people" who are deemed unable to recognize what's good for them. The good news is that time occasionally catches up with them and exposes their artifice.

The grand journalism pooh-bahs at CNN were humiliated this election cycle when WikiLeaks revealed that former CNN contributor and interim DNC chair Donna Brazile had shared a question with the Hillary Clinton campaign in advance of a March Democratic primary town hall debate. According to CNN, "activist anchor" Roland Martin and his production team at CNN's debate partner and identity politics network TV One were responsible for the leak. CNN host Jake Tapper called the episode "very, very troubling" and condemned the breach:

"Journalistically, it's horrifying," he told WMAL radio.

CNN president Jeff Zucker declared after an internal investigation that the network "would not partner ever again" with TV One.

But instead of weeding out left-wing partisans masquerading as mainstream political analysts from their lineup, CNN is doubling down. This week, the network debuted a news special called "The Messy Truth" hosted by "political commentator" Van Jones.

Yeah, that guy.

Before he was pontificating on CNN airwaves, he was a top environmental official of the Obama administration. The special advisor for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality held a special place in Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett's heart. The Chicago power broker took full credit at a fringe Daily Kos blogger conference for recruiting him and closely following his career.

"You guys know Van Jones?" she asked to roaring applause.

"Ooh. Van Jones, all right!" she cooed. "So, Van Jones. We were so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House. We were watching him, uh, really, he's not that old, for as long as he's been active out in Oakland. And all the creative ideas he has. And so now, we have captured that. And we have all that energy in the White House."

One of Jones's more "creative ideas" was signing a petition in 2004 calling for congressional hearings and an investigation by the New York attorney general into "evidence that suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur."

That's right. Valerie Jarrett took credit for recruiting a 9/11 truther who endorsed a petition peddling the crackpot theory that President George W. Bush "may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war."

Under fire, Jones disavowed the statement he had attached his name to — and decried those who dared to hold him responsible for his "creative ideas." It was conservative bloggers, not "real journalists," who exposed Jones's long record of radicalism to the public — leading to his resignation in September 2009.

Van Jones did not just accidentally slip through the cracks of the Obama vetters. They knew what he espoused before they installed him. So did his bosses at CNN who hired him in 2013.

It wasn't his expertise in political science, political history, electoral trends or journalism that got him the job. It was his social justice resume. He rose to public prominence as a race-baiting agitator at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, funded by the George Soros-supported Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the liberal Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. He became a public fixture in the Bay Area after crusading to free convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal for a Marxist organization and lambasting moderate civil rights leaders for objecting to politicizing the classrooms.

In 2011, the late great Andrew Breitbart pulled no punches in describing Jones as a "commie punk" and a "cop killer-supporting, racist, demagogic freak." Jones had employed classic, radical Saul Alinsky-inspired campaign tactics to have Breitbart banned from a website he helped create — the left-wing Huffington Post— simply for writing articles providing alternative views of the tea party and for reporting on the Obama administration's transparency-stifling measures.

Bending to the censorious mob, HuffPo assailed Breitbart's "ad hominem" attack on Jones, which violated "the tenets of debate and civil discourse we have strived for since the day we launched."

The progressives had nothing to say, of course, about Van Jones's own ad hominem attacks when he obscenely and publicly assailed Republicans as "a--holes" — and when he financed, produced and participated in cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal's rap album, which railed against "imperialist" America and white "mother------s" as the "true terrorists."

Now, Jones — who most recently race-baited Donald Trump supporters by blaming them for a "whitelash" — has reinvented himself as a roving correspondent traveling the nation to analyze the election results and to lecture others to "be passionate. But be compassionate, too" with fellow citizens who hold different political viewpoints.

This is CNN: Enabling a lifelong, extremist demagogue — who has actively stifled and smeared conservatives, law enforcement and honorable public servants — to pose as a reasonable news personality Van-splainin' the world.

This goes beyond the sin of "fake news." It's gross media malpractice of the highest order.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+MichelleMalkin@gmail.com (Michelle Malkin)Media IssuesWed, 07 Dec 2016 14:39:57 +0000The Left's Gambleshttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3367-the-lefts-gambles
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3367-the-lefts-gamblesSometimes life forces us to make decisions, even when we don't have enough information to know how the decision will turn out. The risks may be even greater when people make decisions for other people. Yet there are some who are not only willing, but eager, to take decisions away from those who are directly affected.

Something as personal as what doctor we want to go to has been taken out of our hands by ObamaCare. What job offer, at what pay rate, someone wants to accept has been taken out of their hands by minimum wage laws.

Sick people who are dying are prevented from trying a medication that has not yet completed all the long years of tests required by federal regulations — even if the medication has been used for years in other countries without ill effects.

One by one, innumerable decisions have been taken out of the hands of those directly affected. This is not just something that has happened. It is a central part of the agenda of the political left, even though they describe what they are doing in terms of the bad things they claim to be preventing and the good things they claim to be creating.

Minimum wage laws are described as preventing workers from being "exploited" by employers who pay less than what third parties want them to pay. But would people accept wages that third parties don't like if there were better alternatives available?

This is an issue that is very personal to me. When I left home at the age of 17, going out into the world as a black high school dropout with very little experience and no skills, the minimum wage law had been rendered meaningless by ten years of inflation since the law was passed. In other words, there was no minimum wage law in effect, for all practical purposes.

It was far easier for me to find jobs then than it is for teenage black high school dropouts today. After the minimum wage was raised to keep up with inflation, for decades the unemployment rate for black male 17-year-olds never fell below TRIPLE what it was for me — and in some years their unemployment rate was as much as five times what it was when I was a teenager.

Yet many people on the left were able to feel good about themselves for having prevented "exploitation" — that is, wage rates less than what third parties would like to see. No employer in his right mind was going to pay me what third parties wanted paid, when I had nothing to contribute, except in the simplest jobs.

As for me, my options would have been welfare or crime, and welfare was a lot harder to get in those days. As it was, the ineffectiveness of the minimum wage law at that time allowed me time to acquire job skills that would enable me to move on to successively better jobs — and eventually to complete my education. Most people who have minimum wage jobs do not stay at those jobs for life. The turnover rate among people who are flipping hamburgers was found by one study to be so high that those who have such jobs on New Year's Day are very unlikely to still be there at Christmas.

In short, the left has been gambling with other people's livelihoods — and the left pays no price when that gamble fails.

It is the same story when the left prevents dying people from getting medications that have been used for years in other countries, without dire effects, but have not yet gotten through the long maze of federal "safety" regulations in the U.S.

People have died from such "safety." Police are dying from restrictions on them that keep criminals safe.

San Francisco is currently trying to impose more restrictions on the police, restrictions that will prevent them from shooting at a moving car, except under special conditions that they will have to think about when they have a split second to make a decision that can cost them their own lives. But the left will pay no price.

One of the most zealous crusades of the left has been to prevent law-abiding citizens from having guns, even though gun control laws have little or no effect on criminals who violate laws in general. You can read through reams of rhetoric from gun control advocates without encountering a single hard fact showing gun control laws reducing crime in general or murder in particular.

Such hard evidence as exists points in the opposite direction.

But the gun control gamble with other people's lives is undeterred. And the left still pays no price when they are wrong.

That was The Washington Post's breathless announcement this week in the early moments of a deadly attack on the campus of Ohio State University.

I happened to be in an airport awaiting my flight at the same time, and distinctly heard CNN, the self-proclaimed "worldwide leader in news," report the same active shooter scenario. Like The Washington Post, it also jumped to announce on social media, "Ohio State University reports active shooter on campus."

The world quickly learned, of course, that it wasn't an "active shooter" at all.

Rather, Ohio State student and Somali immigrant Abdul Razak Ali Artan deliberately rammed his automobile into a crowd of students, then proceeded to stab others before being shot dead by Ohio State police officer Alan Horujko. Before embarking on his murderous rampage, Artan posted a social media message demanding that America "stop interfering with other countries, especially the Muslim Ummah."

Thus, liberal hopes of a rampage at the hands of a National Rifle Association member once again were foiled.

All of this is not to merely malign the mainstream media's willingness to jump to reporting on what they thought was an active shooting. Erroneous reporting is an unavoidable byproduct of our instantaneous social media culture.

Rather, what adds particular gravity to this latest illustration of mainstream media error is that it occurs as liberals' and mainstream media's simultaneous campaign decrying "fake news," and the suggestion that it directly led to Donald Trump's election.

Their goal, of course, is to narrow the public conception of "legitimate" news sources, which just happen to favor sclerotic mainstream media sources such as the Post, The New York Times, CNN, PBS, NBC, CBS and ABC.

The Washington Post itself just last week issued "The Fact Checker's Guide for Detecting Fake News," which obviously earns retrospective derision based upon its own questionable record. We at CFIF have first-hand experience with their "Fact Checker," when earlier this year they acknowledged the accuracy of our statements yet subjectively gave us two Pinocchios for what they labeled a "semantics game."

And then there's so-called "PolitiFact." During this year's presidential campaign, it chose to set its sights on former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for his claim that, "Hillary Clinton is for open borders." In a lengthy hit piece, PolitiFact asserted that Giuliani's statement was "false."

Lo and behold, a few weeks later WikiLeaks made public an email from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's account that contained the following excerpt from Clinton's paid speech in May 2013 to the private audience hosted by Brazilian financial institution Banco Itau: "My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders."

As for CNN, how could anyone forget the plagiarism scandal surrounding Fareed Zakaria, who to this day appears regularly and even continues to host "Fareed Zakaria GPS?"

Going back a bit further, recall disgraced former CBS News anchor Dan Rather, who infamously peddled fraudulent documents in a hit piece directed at President George W. Bush during a reelection campaign.

And how about The New York Times, which suffered its own humiliating debacle involving reporter Jayson Blair and his fabricated stories?

Then there's Barack Obama himself, who recently instructed us all that, "there's so much active misinformation and it's packaged very well, and it looked the same when you see it on a Facebook page or turn on your television." He added, "And people, if they just repeat attacks enough, and outright lies over and over again, as long as it's on Facebook and people can see it, as long as it's on social media, people start believing it, and it creates this dust cloud of nonsense."

This is the same man who repeatedly guaranteed that "if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep your healthcare plan" in selling ObamaCare.

"Fake news" indeed.

This is just a sampling of liberals' and the mainstream media's inglorious track record in the realm of accuracy and reliability.

The "fake news" campaign is merely their latest ploy to protect their stranglehold on public discourse, alongside their equally baseless effort to malign the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision affirming the 1st Amendment free speech rights of private citizens. Not coincidentally, of the nearly $400,000 in contributions to presidential campaigns reported by journalists, 96% went to Hillary Clinton.

Nor is it any surprise, with all of that in mind, that public opinion surveys show public confidence in the media has dropped to a record low of 5%. Instead of their faux public service campaign against "fake news" from alternative media sources in an effort to protect their old oligarchy, the mainstream media and liberals should start by cleaning up their own house.

At least Justin Bieber is eye candy without the heartburn. Justin Trudeau, on the other hand, is the twinkly-eyed boy toy who makes informed adults wanna hurl.

For more than a year, the liberal Canadian prime minister enjoyed drool-stained global press coverage as the "hot hipster" and "dreamy sex symbol" with great hair and a tribal Haida tattoo. He basked in Ryan Gosling-esque memes about his commitment to feminism and touched off "Trudeau-mania" with a series of shirtless selfies and photobombs.

But this weekend, the sane world saw the baby-faced Commie apologist for the naked twit he truly is.

Mourning the death of repressive dictator Fidel Castro, Trudeau hailed his longtime family friend as a "larger than life leader" who "served his people for almost half a century." Actually, El Comandante ruled with an iron fist and firing squads — serving himself to all of the island's land, private businesses and media, along with his own private yacht, private island, 20 homes, fleet of Mercedes limos and bevy of mistresses.

Trudeau's ridiculous mash note to the "legendary revolutionary and orator" caused the social media backlash of the year. The hashtag #TrudeauEulogies erupted to mock Trudeau's soft-soaping of tyranny.

"As we mourn Emperor Caligula, let us always remember his steadfast devotion to Senate reform," one Twitter user jibed in Trudeau-speak. "Although flawed Hitler was a vegetarian who loved animals, was a contributor to the arts & proud advocate for Germany," another joked. "Kim Jong Il will always be remembered fondly for his leadership and contributions on climate change," another chimed in.

Stung, the Canadian tundra hunk's office announced Monday that he will not attend services for his beloved Uncle Fidel, who had served as a pallbearer at his former Canadian PM father's funeral. But if Trudeau thinks the damage to his celebrity brand is temporary, he has another think coming.

Our neighbors to the north are now discovering what disillusioned Barack Obama worshipers realized too late: Beneath the shiny packaging of supermodel progressivism lies the same old decrepit culture of corruption.

Political watchdogs have been buzzing about Trudeau's shady fundraising ties to Chinese communist moguls. Like Obama, Trudeau promised unprecedented transparency in government — "sunny ways" that would shed open light on how the Liberal Party was conducting the people's business. Dudley Do-Right's party declared there would be "no preferential access, or appearance of preferential access" in exchange for campaign cash and purported to ban favor-seekers with direct business before the government from attending political fundraisers.

Behind closed doors, however, Trudeau was selling out to wealthy Chinese-Canadians and Chinese nationals seeking government green lights for their business deals. According to his conservative critics, Trudeau and the Liberal Party have held 80 such cash-for-access fundraisers crawling with lobbyists and access traders over the past year.

The Globe and Mail newspaper revealed last week that Trudeau and his Liberal Party fundraisers had secretly organized one tony $1,500-per-head private residential gala in May attended by Chinese billionaires and bankers gunning for federal approval of projects. Echoing the operations of the Clinton Foundation pay-for-play money machine, the nonprofit Trudeau Foundation and the University of Montreal raked in $1 million from a wealthy Chinese businessman a few weeks after the fundraiser. The donation includes funding for a statue of Pierre Trudeau, who once wrote a book hailing Chairman Mao.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+MichelleMalkin@gmail.com (Michelle Malkin)State of AffairsWed, 30 Nov 2016 05:48:27 +0000Battle Lines Forming in War Over Trump Courthttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/42-constitution-and-legal/3360-battle-lines-forming-in-war-over-trump-court
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/42-constitution-and-legal/3360-battle-lines-forming-in-war-over-trump-courtOpening shots are being fired over Donald Trump's anticipated Supreme Court nomination. A conservative advocacy group is running television ads urging Trump to appoint a justice in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia. New Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer fires back that Democrats will try to block any nominee who isn't "mainstream."

Trouble is, anybody who disputes the Democrats' left-wing definition of the Constitution as a malleable "living" document is outside their mainstream.

Meanwhile, pro-choice women's groups are panicked about losing abortion "rights." For now, it's much ado about nothing. No matter whom Trump appoints this time, there are already five pro-choice justices on the Court, counting Justice Anthony Kennedy. It would take a second Trump appointment to tilt the Court the other way.

As a candidate Trump pledged to appoint Justices who would uphold "the Constitution as it was meant to be." Trump's victory signals the public agrees.

Even so, Schumer and fellow Democrats are spoiling for a fight. In part, it's revenge for the Republicans' refusal to consider Obama's last high court nominee, Merrick Garland. Will the Democrats' tough talk lead to anything? Unlikely. Ten Senate Democrats in states Trump won are facing tough re-election races in 2018. Count on some of them to help push Trump's pick over the 60-vote threshold to win confirmation.

Trump's first addition to the Court will have a major impact on labor union issues, voting procedures, the death penalty, executive power and religious freedom.

On the separation of church and state, watch for the pending case, Trinity Lutheran Church v. Pauley. The Justices delayed the case while Scalia's seat was vacant, expecting a 4-4 tie. The state of Missouri awards grants to help schools make their playgrounds safer with soft, rubber paving. But Missouri nixed a grant to a Lutheran-affiliated preschool. The school sued, saying its children deserve the same safety enhancements as children in secular schools.

Trump's new justice will shift the Court to allow religious institutions and the faithful to be treated equally with everyone else. Yes, the Constitution bars favoring a particular religion, but that shouldn't require government to discriminate against religion.

Deference to religion doesn't mean limits on abortion. Only 29 percent of Americans think abortion should be legal "under any circumstances," and states continue to enact restrictions. But even with Trump's new justice, the Court will likely strike down these restrictions. Last June, with Scalia's seat vacant, the Court ruled 5-3 against safety regulations that would have forced some Texas abortion clinics to close.

But deference to conscience could give Colorado cake artist Jack Phillips a win over his state's Civil Rights Commission, if the Court takes his case. Phillips was ordered to bake cakes for same-sex weddings, against his beliefs, and "re-educate" his staff.

The Court's most consequential shift will be reining in federal power and overly aggressive regulators. That's the issue in a case the high court may take: Alaska v. Jewell, challenging the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's unprecedented power grab over Alaska's rivers and streams.

Voter ID laws are also up for Supreme Court review, and Trump's appointee is likely to cast the pivotal vote there, too, validating states' efforts to combat voter fraud. During the recent presidential contest, President Obama's lower federal court appointees voted to strike these laws in Texas, North Carolina and Wisconsin. But similar laws survived legal challenges in states where federal judges appointed by Republicans hold sway.

That's a reminder of the importance of Trump's power to appoint not just Supreme Court justices but also hundreds of lower federal court judges. The Supreme Court hears some 75 cases each term. Federal appeals courts hear 30,000. With an unprecedented number of judges scheduled to retire, Trump can turn a majority of federal courts conservative in a mere four years.

By electing Donald Trump, Americans have a shot at restraining government's suffocating power over our daily lives. Now that's "mainstream."

Betsy McCaughey is author of "Government by Choice: Inventing the United States Constitution."
COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM

]]>Betsy@cfif.org (Betsy McCaughey)Constitution & LegalWed, 30 Nov 2016 05:27:07 +0000Democrats and the Nazi Cardhttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3359-democrats-and-the-nazi-card
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3359-democrats-and-the-nazi-cardRep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the odds-on favorite to become the Democratic National Committee's chairman, had a long association with the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam. He compared then-President George W. Bush and 9/11 to Adolf Hitler and the destruction of the Reichstag, the German parliament building: "9/11 is the juggernaut in American history and it allows ... it's almost like, you know, the Reichstag fire," Ellison said. "After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it, and it put the leader of that country (Hitler) in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted."

Comparing Republicans to Nazis has long been a national pastime of the Democratic Party.

During the 1964 Goldwater/Johnson presidential race, Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater accepted an invitation to visit an American military installation located in Bavaria, Germany. On "CBS Evening News," hosted by Walter Cronkite, correspondent Daniel Schorr said: "It is now clear that Sen. Goldwater's interview with Der Spiegel, with its hard line appealing to right-wing elements in Germany, was only the start of a move to link up with his opposite numbers in Germany." The reaction shot — when the cameras returned to Cronkite — showed the "most trusted man in America" gravely shaking his head. When Goldwater accepted the Republican nomination, Democratic California Gov. Pat Brown said, "The stench of fascism is in the air."

About Ronald Reagan, Steven F. Hayward, author of "The Age Of Reagan" wrote: "Liberals hated Reagan in the 1980s. Pure and simple. They used language that would make the most fervid anti-Obama rhetoric of the Tea Party seem like, well, a tea party. Democratic Rep. William Clay of Missouri charged that Reagan was 'trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf.'"

After Republicans took control of the House in the mid-'90s, Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., compared the newly conservative-controlled House to "the Duma and the Reichstag," referring to the legislature set up by Czar Nicholas II of Russia and the parliament of the German Weimar Republic that brought Hitler to power.

About President George W. Bush, billionaire Democratic contributor George Soros said, "(He displays the) supremacist ideology of Nazi Germany," and that his administration used rhetoric that echoes his childhood in occupied Hungary. "When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us,'" Soros said, "it reminds me of the Germans." He also said: "The (George W.) Bush administration and the Nazi and communist regimes all engaged in the politics of fear. ... Indeed, the Bush administration has been able to improve on the techniques used by the Nazi and communist propaganda machines."

Former Vice President Al Gore said: "(George W. Bush's) executive branch has made it a practice to try and control and intimidate news organizations, from PBS to CBS to Newsweek. ... And every day, they unleash squadrons of digital brown shirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President."

Actor/singer and activist Harry Belafonte, who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., called Bush a racist. When asked whether the number and prominence of blacks in the Bush administration perhaps suggested a lack of racism, Belafonte said, "Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich."

NAACP Chairman Julian Bond played the Nazi card several times. Speaking at historically black Fayetteville State University in North Carolina in 2006, Bond said, "The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side."

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who dared to rein in excessive public employee compensation packages, received the full Nazi treatment. The hard-left blog Libcom.org posted in 2011: "Scott Walker is a fascist, perhaps not in the classical sense since he doesn't operate in the streets, but a fascist nonetheless. ... He is a fascist, for his program takes immediate and direct aim at (a sector of) the working class."

After the 2012 Republican National Convention, California Democratic Party Chairman John Burton said, "(Republicans) lie, and they don't care if people think they lie. As long as you lie, (Nazi propaganda minister) Joseph Goebbels — the big lie — you keep repeating it."

The chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, Dick Harpootlian, in 2012, compared the state's Republican governor to Hitler's mistress. When told that the Republicans were holding a competing press conference at a NASCAR Hall of Fame basement studio, Harpootlian told the South Carolina delegation: "(Gov. Nikki Haley) was down in the bunker, a la Eva Braun."

If not the Nazi card, it's the race card or the sexist card or the homophobic card. This "I'm right; you're evil" brand of politics has a lot to do with why voters elected Donald Trump, rather than Hillary "basket of deplorables" Clinton, to serve as our next president.

]]>info@cfif.org (Larry Elder)State of AffairsTue, 29 Nov 2016 13:59:41 +0000Trump's Path to Repealhttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/56-health-care/3358-trumps-path-to-repeal
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/56-health-care/3358-trumps-path-to-repealOn the stump, Donald Trump promised to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Now obstacles are emerging on the left and right. Democrats are sowing panic, falsely predicting that 20 million will lose coverage. Newly elected Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer claims Trump will "rue the day" Obamacare is repealed.

Meanwhile, on Trump's right flank, House Republicans are pushing Medicare "reform" and taxes on workers' health benefits — unpopular ideas that will undermine Trump's political support and derail his agenda.

Here's the real deal about repeal.

Will 20 million lose coverage?

Not even close. Sixteen million of those who gained coverage are enrolled in Medicaid, the public program for low-income residents. Obamacare allowed states to expand who could sign up for Medicaid, with the federal government covering the tab. Repeal could result in less federal funding. But no one is pushing to abolish the nation's health safety net. And states that just expanded Medicaid are unlikely to do a 180 and shrink it. The 16 million are likely safe.

President-elect Trump proposes giving states more flexibility in how Medicaid is managed. That's urgently needed. Federal Medicaid spending has shot up 40 percent in the last three years. Research shows that extra spending is not improving health.

What about the other nearly 5 million newly insured? They're in Obamacare plans, along with another 6 million who already had insurance, and all of them are having a tough time. Technically, they're "covered," but many can't come up with the cash to see a doctor. They're struggling with exorbitant deductibles — $6,000 per person for the typical bronze plan.

In short, about 5 million previously uninsured people — not the bogus 20 million — may need help after repeal. Trump is proposing market reforms to lower costs and increase choices for consumers stuck in the individual market.

Will people with pre-existing conditions lose out?

No. All the GOP replacement plans protect them, but not through the cynical, coercive scheme that Obamacare used.

Obama forced two groups of people into the same insurance pool: the healthy and the chronically ill. Healthy people would pay premiums but never meet their sky-high deductibles. Instead their premiums would foot huge medical bills for the chronically ill, who consume 10 times as much medical care. Healthy people saw it was a scam. They refused to sign up, despite the penalty.

Sorry. There's a fairer way. Trump would allow insurers to charge ill people more, and then subsidize these "high-risk" customers with taxpayer dollars. That spreads the cost fairly over the whole population, instead of burdening people in the individual market.

Voila, premiums and deductibles will drop fast for people in the individual market.

President Obama is incredulous that people think Obamacare "doesn't work." More than 200 million have been hurt by it. Count them: 155 million with employer-provided plans whose deductibles have soared thanks to the ACA, plus the 11 million paying ACA penalties for not enrolling, plus hundreds of thousands of part-time workers whose hours were slashed by employers dodging the mandate, and 55 million seniors harmed when Medicare funding cuts bankrolled Obamacare.

A Medicare battle could torpedo his agenda. Remember the demagogues, who vilified Ryan in 2012 with images of granny going over the cliff in a wheelchair?

Paul Ryan and Mike Price also want to cap the tax exemption on employer-provided health plans. That would betray union workers who for years have swapped raises for lavish tax-free health benefits. These workers just gave Trump his remarkable win.

Trump made the election a referendum on Obamacare. Republicans in Congress need to respect the voters and make Donald Trump's agenda the priority.

Betsy McCaughey is author of "Government by Choice: Inventing the United States Constitution."
COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM

]]>Betsy@cfif.org (Betsy McCaughey)Health CareWed, 23 Nov 2016 12:55:03 +0000The Return of Assassination Fascinationhttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3357-the-return-of-assassination-fascination
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3357-the-return-of-assassination-fascinationAlert the CDC: Left-wing America has been overcome by another contagious epidemic of assassination fascination. It's time to declare a public health crisis.

In San Antonio last week, two high school students performed a sicko skit depicting the assassination of President-elect Donald Trump.

In Cleveland, unhinged 24-year-old Zachary Benson tweeted his "life goal is to assassinate Trump." The hashtag #AssassinateTrump surfaced on Twitter, along with a flood of bloodthirsty death wishes.

Another #AssassinateTrump threat came from Atlanta public transit employee Aleama Philips, who tweeted, "I wish I had the balls to kill him myself," illustrated with a photo of Trump dead and riddled with bullets. She was fired by the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority last week.

In San Diego, the loony (and now former) CEO of cybersecurity firm PacketSled, Matt Harrigan, took to Facebook on election night to declare: "I'm going to kill the president." He further threatened that he was "getting a sniper rifle and perching myself where it counts. Find a bedroom in the White House that suits you, [expletive]. I'll find you."

In the music world, rapper Rick Ross vowed to "assassinate Trump like I'm (George) Zimmerman."

Inevitably, the Kill Trump mania has spread overseas. French radio host Pablo Mira reportedly gloated: "Donald Trump and his victory have given a hope in the American people — the hope that he would be killed even before his inauguration."

Where is your condemnation of these perverted incitements to violence, President Obama?

Where are you, media concern trolls, to bemoan the anti-Trump culture of hatred and climate of intolerance?

AWOL, of course. The Blame Righty crowd that has falsely blamed random shootings and suicides on conservative talk radio, the tea party, right-wing blogs and Fox News is nowhere to be found when left-wing violent extremism rears its ugly head.

Double-standard-itis is a chronic and recurring condition, accompanied by politically expedient amnesia. Assassination chic was all the rage when George W. Bush took office and extended throughout his two terms in office. I remember — even if the civility and tolerance police at The New York Times don't.

Protesters displayed signs of a decapitated Bush gushing blood from his neck and slogans proclaiming "Bush — the only dope worth shooting."

"Kill Bush" T-shirts spattered with fake blood went on sale at CafePress.com.

An art exhibit in Chicago featured Al Brandtner's work titled "Patriot Act," a sheet of mock 37-cent red, white and blue stamps showing a handgun pointed at Bush's head.

Off-Broadway play "I'm Going to Kill the President" led audience members in a group chant screaming, you guessed it, "I'm Going to Kill the President."

"Comedian" Rich Hall performed a public hate anthem, "Let's get together and kill George Bush."

Former Democratic Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear joked: "When I mention that Democrats are problem solvers, I can think of only one Republican who can be a problem solver — that is Vice President Dick Cheney
(who accidentally shot a hunting companion in 2006) if he would just take George on a hunting trip."

Nicholson Baker penned "Checkpoint," a novella conversation between two people debating assassinating President Bush with "radio-controlled flying saws" or a "remote-controlled boulder made of depleted uranium."

Sarah Vowell wrote "Assassination Vacation," a best-selling murder travelogue of assassinated Republican presidents, in which she confessed she was so crippled by hatred of Bush that she couldn't even write his name and admitted that her "simmering rage against the current president scares me."

Across the pond, Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker lamented Bush's election with a screed asking, "John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. — where are you now that we need you?"

British docudrama "Death of a President" imagined the assassination of Bush by a gunman at the Chicago Sheraton hotel after an anti-war rally.

And Code Pink poster woman Cindy Sheehan penned an autobiography in which she confessed her presidential murder fantasy — going back in time and killing the infant Bush in order to prevent the Iraq War. She admitted she had entertained this infanticidal fantasy "often."

From "Kill Bush" to #AssassinateTrump, the naked hypocrisy of the "love and peace" left is on full display. Spare us the lectures about diversity, tolerance and safe spaces. Look in the mirror. Put down the haterade. Seek help.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+MichelleMalkin@gmail.com (Michelle Malkin)State of AffairsWed, 23 Nov 2016 05:53:07 +0000Backward-Looking 'Progressives'http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3355-backward-looking-progressives
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3355-backward-looking-progressivesPeople who call themselves "progressives" claim to be forward-looking, but a remarkable amount of the things they say and do are based on looking backward.

One of the maddening aspects of the thinking, or non-thinking, on the political left is their failure to understand that there is nothing they can do about the past. Whether people on the left are talking about college admissions or criminal justice, or many other decisions, they go on and on about how some people were born with lesser chances in life than other people.

Whoever doubted it? But, once someone who has grown up is being judged by a college admissions committee or by a court of criminal justice, there is nothing that can be done about their childhood. Other institutions can deal with today's children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and should, but the past is irrevocable. Even where there are no economic differences among various families in which children are raised, there are still major differences in the circumstances into which people are born, even within the same family, which affect their chances in later life as adults.

For example, among children of the same parents, raised under the same roof, the first born, as a group, have done better than their later siblings, whether measured by IQ tests or by becoming National Merit Scholarship finalists or by various other achievements.

The only child has also done better, on average, than children who have siblings. The advantage of the first born may well be due to the fact that he or she was an only child for some time, perhaps for several formative years.

By the time people have grown up and apply to college, all that is history. Nothing that a college admissions committee can do will change anything about their childhoods. The only things these committees' decisions can affect are the present and the future. This is not rocket science.

Nevertheless, there are people who urge college admissions committees to let disadvantaged students be admitted with lower test scores or other academic indicators.

Those who say such things seldom even attempt to see what the actual consequences of such policies have been. The prevailing preconceptions — sometimes called what "everybody knows" — are sufficient for them.

Factual studies show that admitting students to institutions whose standards they do not meet often leads to needless academic failures, even among students with above average ability, who could have succeeded at other institutions whose standards they do meet.

The most comprehensive of these studies of Americans is the book "Mismatch" by Sander and Taylor. Similar results in other countries are cited in my own book, "Affirmative Action Around the World."

When it comes to criminal justice, there is much the same kind of preoccupation on the left with the past that cannot be changed. Murderers may in some cases have had unhappy childhoods, but there is absolutely nothing that anybody can do to change their childhoods after they are adults.

The most that can be done is to keep murderers from committing more murders, and to deter others from committing murder. People on the left who want to give murderers "another chance" are gambling with the lives of innocent people. That is one of many other examples of the cruel consequences of seemingly compassionate decisions and policies.

Ironically, people on the left who are preoccupied with the presumably unhappy childhoods of murderers, which they can do nothing about, seldom show similar concern about the present and future unhappy childhoods of the orphans of people who have been murdered.

Such inconsistencies are not peculiar to our time, though they seem to be more pervasive today. But the left has been trying, for more than 200 years, to mitigate or eliminate punishments in general, and capital punishment in particular. What is peculiar to our time is the degree to which the views of the left have become laws and policies.

A long overdue backlash against those views has begun in some Western nations, of which the recent election results in the United States are just one symptom. How all this will end is by no means clear. Just as the past cannot be changed, so the future cannot be predicted with certainty.

Among other tragic vignettes from the past week, The New York Times reported that, "Mrs. Clinton's campaign was so confident in her victory that her aides popped open champagne on the campaign plane early Tuesday."

Our sympathies to the poor staffer tasked with cleaning up that mess.

Elsewhere across America, inconsolable college students retreated to "safe spaces" to work it all out through hug-ins. Millennials rioted in deep-blue cities like Portland and Los Angeles while demanding an end to an electoral college that they probably assume is located somewhere in Flyover Country and plays in the Big XII or some other red state athletic conference. "Saturday Night Live" opened with Kate McKinnon fighting back tears in her Hillary Clinton persona - symbolic white pantsuit and all - with the words, "I'm not giving up, and neither should you." Barack Obama himself had to welcome a successor whom he mocked only days earlier on Jimmy Kimmel Live with the words, "At least I will go down as a president."

Meanwhile, social media was saturated with posts advocating Brexit-style state secession under such names as "Calexit."

But things aren't all bad. There are some silver linings among the liberal clouds.

They're suddenly realizing that some of the political tactics they cheered throughout the Obama Administration, such as lawless presidential overreach in the form of executive orders, might not have been so wise after all. What Obama did with his pen and phone, Trump can just as easily un-do with his own pen and phone.

Liberals are also realizing that principles conservatives advocated throughout the Obama Administration might not be such bad ideas after all.

Going back to their "Calexit" secession idea, for instance, take federalism.

Among our Founding Fathers' preeminent concerns was the inevitable political division flowing from the stark diversity among the citizens of different states and regions, even with just thirteen states within a narrow longitude at the time. Citizens of 1780s Boston lived very different lives than those in rural Georgia, while merchants of New York City maintained different lifestyles and priorities than farmers of agrarian Virginia.

Accordingly, they devised a federalist system that survives over two centuries later.

On the one hand, some rights remain so inviolable and universal that the Founding Fathers explicitly enshrined them in the Bill of Rights and the text of the Constitution itself. Protection against ex post facto prosecution, the First Amendment freedoms of speech, religion and assembly and the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms were considered so central to our concept of ordered liberty that they became national rights. The powers to wage war or enter into treaties with other nations were so obviously within the power of the national government that the Constitution secured them for the central government.

Outside of those select, fundamental rights and powers, however, the Founders knew that America would function most fairly and most effectively if citizens of different states were left otherwise free to govern themselves. They deliberately inserted the Tenth Amendment, which reads, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

That federalist balance is one reason the United States became the most prosperous, powerful and innovative nation in human history. Individual states became "laboratories of democracy" in which different ideas in governance and lifestyle could be tested against human nature and everyday reality.

Over two centuries on, despite nationwide and worldwide homogenization through technology and culture, citizens in different states maintain very different moral, intellectual, religious and cultural outlooks. Unfortunately, too often we've seen federal officials attempt to impose their one-size-fits-all policies upon the nation when allowing states to test and innovate would have been preferable.

If citizens of Massachusetts, as just one example, prefer ObamaCare or single-payer healthcare, then they should be free to try it without forcing citizens of Utah or Texas to endure a dysfunctional system that they oppose.

Today, with the election of Donald Trump as President, citizens in more liberal states are suddenly awakening to the possibility that after eight years of a President Obama whose policies they happened to favor, four or eight years of a President Trump will bring policies they find intolerable.

By simply acceding to a more proper degree of federalism, and restoring greater powers of governance and free choice to diverse citizens of very different states, they may discover that we really can all get along after all.

]]>tlee@cfif.org (Timothy H. Lee)State of AffairsWed, 16 Nov 2016 14:22:34 +0000Trump vs. the Federal Bureaucracy http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3350-trump-vs-the-federal-bureaucracy-
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3350-trump-vs-the-federal-bureaucracy-Donald Trump's triumph over Hillary Clinton presages an even bigger battle against the heart of the Democratic establishment: the federal workforce. This army of bureaucrats — almost 3 million strong — gave Clinton a large majority of their votes and over 90 percent of their campaign contributions. Count on federal workers and their union bosses to use every trick in the book to block Trump's reform agenda.

Trump's ability to fix the Department of Veterans Affairs, clean up IRS abuses, rollback job-killing regulations and get taxpayers' their money's worth all hinge on uprooting the entrenched civil service. Newt Gingrich, a top Trump advisor, warns that "if you don't fix this problem, nothing in government is going to work."

That's a tall order. The bureaucracy generally retains its vise-like grip on the executive branch, as presidents come and go.

Public unions are already digging in for a fight. Responding to the election, J. David Cox, President of the American Federation of Government Employees dismissed Trump's plans as more or less irrelevant. AFGE members have their own big-government agenda, and "that never changes no matter who sits in the White House." Protection of the status quo at any cost.

Even death. Thousands of sick vets died at the VA because of employee self-dealing. Bureaucrats doctored the medical wait lists to earn bonuses while vets languished without care.

Despite Congress enacting "reforms" and President Obama appointing a new VA secretary in 2014, the bureaucracy continues to block giving vets access to civilian care. How impossible is it to fire anyone at the VA? A surgeon found guilty of abandoning a patient on the operating table and leaving the medical center still got an $11,000 bonus.

Candidate Trump promised to make swift changes at the VA. Exit polls show military families voted for him 2-1 over Clinton. Dan Caldwell of Concerned Veterans for America says he's encouraged to see civil service reform at the top of Trump's agenda.

And the same changes needed to turn around the VA have to be made across all federal departments. Right now, workers found guilty of serious misdeeds — tax evasion, watching porn on the job and fraudulent collection of unemployment benefits — typically keep their jobs and get bonuses. Firing requires so many months of documentation, hearings and appeals that bosses decide it's not worth the trouble. No-show jobs are rampant, costing $1 billion a year. Supervisors ignore the costs and just hire someone else to get the work done.

Breaking up the federal employee protection racket will require muscle from Congress and the Department of Justice. Obama's DOJ obstructed efforts to fire wrongdoers and incompetents. Now with the White House and Congress under Republican control, taxpayers can take heart.

A bipartisan VA reform bill with real teeth has already passed the House and is ready for Senate action. It will shorten the process for firing and demoting VA senior personnel, even eliminating appeals to the misnamed Merit Systems Protection Board, which protects criminals and deadwood, not merit.

Will Trump, a newcomer to Washington, D.C., succeed where other presidents have failed? Possibly. He's shown he gets his money's worth. After all, he defeated spendthrift Clinton with less than a quarter of the campaign staff and half the spending.

But federal employees will scramble to stay on the gravy train. They earn a whopping $123,160 a year on average — about a third more than private sector employees — get over a month off with pay and don't lose sleep over getting fired. Hard to call them civil "servants."

President Obama hiked their pay, and Hillary Clinton promised to give them even more, in return for their votes, of course. One hand washes the other. But Donald Trump understands who should be calling the shots in Washington: not federal bureaucrats, but the taxpayers who cover their salaries.

Donald Trump gets it -- somewhat. He vows to repeal Obamacare's most burdensome federal mandates that are jacking up the price of private health insurance. But he also plans to preserve the most politically popular provisions of the Orwellian-titled Affordable Care Act, including the so-called "slacker mandate." It's the requirement that employer-based health plans cover employees' children until they turn 26 years old.

That's right: Twenty-freaking-six.

Is it any wonder why we have a nation of dependent drool-stained crybabies on college campuses who are still bawling about the election results one week later?

Trump briefly mentioned during a "60 Minutes" interview on CBS this weekend that the slacker mandate "adds cost, but it's very much something we're going to try and keep." That's because most establishment Republicans in Washington, D.C., are resigned to keeping it. Once the feds hand out a sugary piece of cradle-to-grave entitlement candy, it's almost impossible to snatch it back.

Who pays for this unfunded government mandate? As usual, it's responsible working people who bear the burden.

Earlier this year, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the No Slacker Left Behind provision resulted in wage reductions of about $1,200 a year for workers with employer-based insurance coverage — whether or not they had adult children on their plans. In effect, childless working people are subsidizing workers with adult children who would rather stay on their parents than get their own.

Moreover, according to company surveys and other economic analysis, the slacker mandate has resulted in overall increased health care costs of between 1 and 3 percent. The nonpartisan American Health Policy Institute reported one firm's estimate of millennial coverage mandate costs at a whopping $69 million over 10 years.

At the time the federal slacker mandate was adopted in 2010, some 20 states had already adopted legislation requiring insurers to cover Big Kids — some up to age 31!

Yes, thirty-freaking-one.

In Wisconsin, the slacker mandate covered not only adult children, but also the children of those "children" if they lived in single-parent homes. In New Jersey, champions of the provision claimed it would help cover 100,000 uninsured young adults. But health policy researcher Nathan Benefield of the Commonwealth Foundation reported that "only 6 percent of that estimate has been realized" in its first two years. "The primary reason — health insurance is still too expensive."

That has only gotten worse, of course, as Obamacare's other expensive mandates — especially guaranteed issue for those with pre-existing conditions — sabotage the private individual market for health insurance, leaving young and healthy people with fewer choices, higher premiums and crappier plans. The solution is not more mandates, but fewer; more competition, not less.

The Obama White House will brag that the slacker mandate has resulted in increased coverage for an estimated 3 million people. As usual with Obamacare numbers, it's Common Core, book-cooked math. Health care analyst Avik Roy took a closer look and found that the inflated figure came from counting "(1) young adults on Medicaid and other government programs, for whom the under-26 mandate doesn't apply; and (2) people who gained coverage due to the quasi-recovery from the Great Recession."

To add insult to injury, another NBER study found that roughly 5 percent of people younger than 26 dropped out of the workforce after the provision was implemented. They used their spare time to increase their socialization, sleeping, physical fitness and personal pursuit of "meaningfulness."

Then there are the hidden costs of the millennial mandate: the cultural consequences. All this "free" stuff, detached from those actually paying the bills, reduces the incentives for 20-somethings to grow up and seek independent lives and livelihoods. Why bother? The societal sanctions have been eroded.

Now, the nation is suffering the consequences of decades of that collective coddling. Precious snowflakes can't handle rejection at the ballot box or responsibilities in the marketplace. Appropriately enough, the new virtue signals of tantrum-throwing young leftists stirring up trouble are safety pins — to show "solidarity" with groups supposedly endangered by Donald Trump.

Safety pins are also handy — for holding up the government-manufactured diapers in which too many overgrown dependents are swaddled.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+MichelleMalkin@gmail.com (Michelle Malkin)Health CareWed, 16 Nov 2016 05:26:12 +0000Trump Seals Obama's Legacyhttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3344-trump-seals-obamas-legacy
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3344-trump-seals-obamas-legacy"I will consider it a personal insult, an insult to my legacy, if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election. You want to give me a good sendoff? Go vote!" — Barack Obama, September 18, 2016

Sometime during election night, a humiliating and horrifying thought crept into Barack Obama's mind: "This January, I will have to attend Donald Trump's inauguration."

Perhaps most depressing for Obama, a man preternaturally inclined toward scapegoating others for his failures, he has only himself to blame.

Recall that back in 2008, a cocksure Obama maintained very different expectations, aspiring to a presidency as "transformational" as Ronald Reagan's. "Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not, and a way that Bill Clinton did not," Obama pronounced. "We want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that has been missing."

Ironically, Obama's performance record ensured that Reagan remains the only president since Franklin Roosevelt who was so successful and so beloved that his party was awarded a third consecutive White House term. Truman couldn't do it, Eisenhower couldn't do it, Johnson couldn't do it, Nixon couldn't do it, Clinton couldn't do it, Bush couldn't do it and now Obama couldn't do it.

Only Reagan.

Embarrassingly for Obama, this is also the first election since Eisenhower in 1952 in which a Republican enters the White House with his party controlling both houses of Congress. Additionally, Republicans control at least 66% of state governors' houses (with one race in North Carolina unsettled) and more state legislative chambers than at any time since the 1920s.

As even The Washington Post acknowledged, "Barack Obama's Presidency Has Been a Very Good Thing for Republicans."

A leading reason is his namesake "achievement," ObamaCare. Even before FBI Director James Comey reopened the investigation into Clinton's email misdeeds in late October, her poll numbers were rapidly descending amid news of skyrocketing healthcare costs and fewer choices for consumers.

And given the fact that ObamaCare has remained widely unpopular since its inception, with Americans saying they prefer the healthcare system that preexisted it, repeal and replacement is probably the first order of business for the new Congress and Trump Administration in January.

Gone is the possibility of a third Supreme Court appointment via his nominee Merrick Garland, presumably to be replaced by one of the outstanding names among Trump's list of potential nominees. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R - Kentucky) deserves commendation for his steadfast leadership in successfully blocking Obama's nominee despite liberal jeremiads.

Obama's spoiled legacy also includes what is by far the worst deficit spending record in American history. During his eight years in office, and despite maligning George W. Bush's comparatively small deficits as "unpatriotic" while running for office in 2008, Obama has essentially added as much debt as all previous presidents combined.

And in terms of the economy, which remains Americans' primary issue of concern, Obama is now the only president in recorded U.S. history who never witnessed a single year of at least 3% annual economic growth during his tenure. To place that in perspective, the U.S. has averaged 3.3% annual growth since World War II, but Obama averaged approximately 2% and never even reached that historical norm, let alone exceeded it in a way that someone aspiring to a Reaganesque legacy could be expected to achieve.

Depressingly, the nation's first black president also somehow managed to see voter pessimism regarding race relations reach an all-time high. His "us-versus-them" identity politics, including offensive comments like "typical white person" and "if I had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin," only had a boomerang effect.

Now Trump and Republicans are the proverbial dog that just caught the car. So what now?

The first order of business is obviously repealing and replacing ObamaCare before it harms even more Americans.

National security and defense revitalization also sit high atop our national to-do list.

Obama's foreign policy legacy is one of diminished trust among our friends and diminished respect among our foes, and there's not a single significant theater on the globe where America stands better off today than when he entered office nearly eight years ago. By ensuring sufficient military funding and restoring greater trust among military leaders, we can not only better safeguard American interests abroad, but simultaneously reassure allies and place potential enemies on notice that eight years of American weakness are at an end.

On that note, embracing Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and restoring the bust of Winston Churchill that Obama banned from the White House in a fit of pique would be a welcome start.

Long-overdue tax reform is another critical agenda item, including reduction of our corporate tax rate that is the developed world's highest, lest even more corporations relocate their headquarters and jobs overseas in order to escape our oppressive rate and Byzantine complexity. Better leadership within the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is also imperative, in order to revitalize technological and telecommunications investment and growth.

And to the extent that liberals in Congress attempt to obstruct reform, another legacy that Obama may soon regret is his aggressive use of executive orders to enact change. What Obama so often did through "pen and phone" can just as easily be undone in the same manner. That was a risk he ran, and liberals can't be heard to complain about it should President Trump do the same thing.

In that regard, Trump's bull-in-a-china shop manner may sometimes prove a feature, not a bug.

In any event, this week's election of a man whom Obama repeatedly labeled unfit to even hold the office of president has reordered America's electoral map and doomed the legacy Obama hoped to preserve.

]]>info@cfif.org (CFIF Staff)State of AffairsWed, 09 Nov 2016 20:31:38 +0000Identity Politics in America: a Post-Mortemhttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3341-identity-politics-in-america-a-post-mortem
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3341-identity-politics-in-america-a-post-mortemHere is what eight years of President Obama's "post-racial" reign have wrought.

The weekend before Election Day, Hillary Clinton grinned from ear to ear at a Cleveland rally while reciting a verse from Jay-Z's remix of Young Jeezy's "My President is Black." As the rapper and his Black Lives Matter-promoting wife, Beyonce, beamed on stage nearby, pandersuit-clad Clinton twanged with a stilted accent:

"Remember, Jay memorably said: 'Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther could walk, and Martin Luther walked so Barack Obama could run, and Barack Obama ran so all the children could fly.'"

This would be comical if not for the noxious cynicism of it all. Clinton may not remember (if she was ever aware in the first place), but the original version of "My President is Black" is a brazen middle finger to nonblack America. Just a few lines after the verse Hillary quoted, the song taunts:

Hello Miss America, hey pretty lady

Red, white, and blue flag, wave for me baby

Never thought I'd say this s---, baby I'm good

You can keep your p---, I don't want no more Bush

No more war, no more Iraq

No more white lies, the President is black

So the poster granny for liberal white privilege, groveling for black votes, kissed the rings of celebrity Obama BFFs Jay-Z and Beyonce by parroting an inflammatory anthem laced with profanities and radical racialized gloating.

Could there have been a more perfect beclownment to cap Clinton's phony-baloney "Stronger Together" campaign?

After denigrating millions of Trump supporters as "deplorable" and "irredeemable" earlier this year, Clinton then unctuously confessed on election eve: "I regret deeply how angry the tone of the campaign became."

Note the classic textbook employment of the passive voice to evade personal responsibility.

The good news is that after being blasted as haters by Clinton's hate-filled minions, after being slapped down as racial "cowards" by Clintonite holdover Eric Holder, after being lambasted as "xenophobes" and "nativists" by immigration expansionists in both parties, after enduring a string of faked hate crimes blamed on conservatives, after ceaseless accusations of "Islamophobia" in the wake of jihad attacks on American soil, after baseless accusations of "homophobia" for protesting the government's gay wedding cake coercion, and after mourning a growing list of police officers ambushed and targeted by violent thugs seeking racial vengeance, an undeniable movement of citizens in the 2016 election cycle decided to push back.

When all is said and done, one of the most important cultural accomplishments of Donald Trump's bid will be the platform he created for Americans of all colors, ethnicities, political affiliations, and socioeconomic backgrounds to defy soul-draining identity politics.

Beltway chin-pullers expediently focused on Trump's white and conservative supporters who are rightly sick and tired of social justice double standards. But they ignored the increasingly vocal constituency of hyphen-free, label-rejecting American People Against Political Correctness who don't fit old narratives and boxes.

And the same "Never Trump" pundits and establishment political strategists who gabbed endlessly about the need for "minority outreach" after 2012 were flummoxed by the blacks, gays, Latinos, women and Democrats who rallied behind the GOP candidate.

The most important speech of the 2016 election cycle wasn't delivered by one of the presidential candidates. It came from iconoclastic Silicon Valley entrepreneur/investor and Trump supporter Peter Thiel who best explained the historically significant backlash against the intolerant tolerance mob and phony diversity-mongers.

"Louder voices have sent a message that they do not intend to tolerate the views of one half of the country," he observed at the National Press Club last week. He recounted how the gay magazine The Advocate, which had once praised him as a "gay innovator," declared he was "not a gay man" anymore because of his libertarian, limited-government politics.

"The lie behind the buzzword of diversity could not be made more clear," Thiel noted. "If you don't conform, then you don't count as diverse, no matter what your personal background."

Trump's eclectic coalition was bound by that common thread: disaffected individuals tired of being told they don't count and discounted because their views do not properly "match" their gender, chromosomes, skin color or ethnicity. That is exactly why the more they and their nominee were demonized, the stronger their support grew.

He's right. I too often take for granted my own personal awakening about the entrenched tribalism of identity politics at a crazy liberal arts college in the early 1990s. The liberation from collectivist ideology is profound and lasting. Witnessing so many outspoken newcomers arrive at this enlightenment, however circuitous the route, has been the most encouraging and underappreciated phenomenon of the 2016 campaign.

Michelle Malkin is a senior editor at Conservative Review. For more articles and videos from Michelle, visit ConservativeReview.com.
COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+MichelleMalkin@gmail.com (Michelle Malkin)State of AffairsWed, 09 Nov 2016 18:59:01 +0000Votes Count, Rules Count Morehttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3340-votes-count-rules-count-more
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3340-votes-count-rules-count-moreThe outcome of the wildest presidential election in our lifetimes will likely boil down to the rules in our rule book: the U.S. Constitution. There may be more surprises ahead, but the framers prepared us for almost any contingency. Look for electors going rogue, an Electoral College deadlock, or contested voting results like Florida in 2000. There's even a bizarre possibility of a Trump-Kaine administration. Here's what to watch for:

Can the winner of the popular vote lose? You bet. That's happened four times before, most recently when Al Gore won the popular vote by 540,000 in 2000. The Electoral College — a body set up by the framers — actually chooses the president. Each state gets a number of electors equal to its representation in the House and Senate combined. So New York with 27 congressional seats has 29 electors, but tiny New Hampshire has only four. Electors are expected to vote for their state's popular vote winner.

Even if Hillary Clinton racks up huge margins in Illinois, New York and other states with lots of urban voters, Donald Trump could still eke out an electoral college win because of his following in many less populous states. That's by design. The framers wanted to ensure that the president-elect has support from all parts of the nation.

Late-breaking surprises are possible right up to Jan. 6. That's the day Congress meets to count the electoral votes. It's generally just mechanical. But there could be shockers this time.

Pay attention to maverick electors. Generally, electors are party loyalists and big donors who regard the task as ceremonial. But nothing in the U.S. Constitution or federal law prevents them from defying the popular vote in their state. Some state laws bar defiance, but those laws are constitutionally suspect.

In our nation's history, 85 electors have defied voters and gone with conscience instead. This time around, a Washington State Democratic elector — with strong feelings for Bernie Sanders — has already announced that he won't cast his vote for Hillary Clinton if she wins his state. He says Clinton is a "criminal" and "she will not get my vote, period." A second Washington State Democratic elector says he hasn't ruled out going rogue.

In past elections, errant electors haven't changed history, but with disaffection for the candidates rampant among the party faithful, and Clinton and Trump neck in neck in battleground states, all bets are off.

An Electoral College deadlock is possible. To win, a candidate must get 270 electoral votes — a majority of the nation's 538 total. The race is so close, it's possible Clinton and Trump could tie at 269. In that case, the Constitution says the House of Representatives chooses the president, with each state having one vote, and the Senate chooses the vice president. The House is likely to stay Republican after the election, guaranteeing Trump a big advantage.

No one knows which party will control the new Senate that will convene in January, just in time to resolve the deadlock. If it still has a Republican majority, Pence would be chosen. But if Democrats win Senate control, Tim Kaine would be their pick. Voila! A Trump-Kaine administration. They'd get along about as well as Cain and Abel.

Will the Supreme Court decide the election? Democrats and Republicans are already lawyering up, laying the groundwork for possible challenges to the popular vote in states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania. Just like Bush v. Gore, this election could land in the Supreme Court. With only eight justices, a deadlock there is possible. But hold on. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg may have to recuse herself due to her disparaging comments about Trump last July.

The framers anticipated politics would always be tumultuous and, yes, corrupt. Thanks to the rules they devised and Americans have respected ever since, the nation has survived 57 presidential contests. We'll get through this one, too.

To most Americans, that's a preposterous question that answers itself. After all, there's nothing more central to our representative democracy than the 1st Amendment right to support or oppose candidates, or offer information and opinions about them.

Liberals, however, take a radically different and restrictionist view.

If that sounds unfair, look no further than how they distort the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision. Here's how the Supreme Court officially framed the legal question presented:

In January 2008, appellant Citizens United, a nonprofit corporation, released a documentary (hereinafter Hillary) critical of then-Senator Hillary Clinton, a candidate for her party's presidential nomination. Anticipating that it would make Hillary available on cable television through video-on-demand within 30 days of primary elections, Citizens United produced television ads to run on broadcast and cable television. Concerned about possible civil and criminal penalties, it sought declaratory and injunctive relief.

Considering the recent geyser of revelations surrounding Hillary Clinton and governmental endeavors to enable her in recent weeks, the issue seems even more grave in retrospect.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court by a narrow 5-4 majority protected free speech rather than the bureaucratic desire to censor it.

Liberals responded histrionically, and to this day employ the term "Citizens United" as epithet and shorthand for powerful corporate interests allegedly controlling our political process. But the dirty little secret is that those who oppose Citizens United are the ones who crave more centralized control over our political process and discourse by powerful institutions.

After all, when private citizens' freedom to engage in political speech expands, the power of mainstream media and politicians to control what enters the marketplace of ideas proportionally contracts.

Sure enough, "curating" private political speech is exactly what Barack Obama advocated in a recent speech, as recounted by Yahoo News:

Recalling past days when three television channels delivered fact-based news that most people trusted, Obama said democracy requires citizens to be able to sift through lies and distortions. 'We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to,' Obama said at an innovation conference in Pittsburgh. 'There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard because they just don't have any basis in anything that's actually happening in the world,' Obama added.

"Truthiness?"

A "curating function?"

That's pretty rich from the man who was awarded PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" for his claim that under ObamaCare, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it." Or how about his "not a smidgen of corruption" whopper regarding IRS targeting of conservative groups?

There's also the obvious problem that the three television channels Obama fondly recalls included CBS's Dan Rather, who infamously peddled fake documents in an attempt to bring down President George W. Bush.

Unfortunately, it's not just political authorities seeking centralization and homogenization of political discourse.

Facebook, for example, apparently did exactly the sort of "curating" that Obama advocated. It was recently revealed that it instructed so-called "news curators" to manipulate its "trending news" algorithms to stifle conservative perspectives and stories.

And over at Google's YouTube, as just one other recent example, short educational videos by conservative commentator and radio host Dennis Prager were censored despite the fact that they contained no profanity, graphic violence or other offensive content.

The simple fact is that powerful liberal political and social forces want fewer voices, not more. They prefer more centralization and control, not less. They want less diversity, not more. They want a narrower marketplace of ideas, not a wider one. They want to centralize speech, not democratize it.

And as the ongoing revelations surrounding Hillary Clinton, her governmental enablers and media accomplices show, the last thing America needs is a narrow group of powerful interests "curating" our discourse, limiting our content and imposing their groupthink by limiting the marketplace of voices and ideas.

So the next time you hear someone criticize Citizens United or attempt to dupe the American electorate with their false populism, keep in mind that they actually seek what they claim to oppose.

]]>tlee@cfif.org (Timothy H. Lee)State of AffairsThu, 03 Nov 2016 12:51:43 +0000Last Chance to Get Rid of Obamacarehttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/56-health-care/3334-last-chance-to-get-rid-of-obamacare
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/56-health-care/3334-last-chance-to-get-rid-of-obamacareThis election is a referendum on the Affordable Care Act. Almost everyone in America is affected, and it's harming millions more people than it's helping. Donald Trump is promising to "repeal and replace the disaster known as Obamacare." Hillary Clinton defends it and wants to "build on it."

"Disaster" sums up the skyrocketing premiums and lack of choice facing many of the 11 million people enrolled in the exchange plans. The plans are unaffordable, unless you're a low earner getting a free ride.

Obamacare enrollees aren't the only people being clobbered. If you get insured at work — as 155 million people do — your deductibles are up a staggering 49 percent since 2011 thanks to Obamacare. Part-timers are working fewer hours, so employers can avoid Obamacare's employer mandate. Taxpayers are on the hook for some 50 new taxes. Seniors get hit the hardest. Over half of Obamacare's costs are paid for by cutting Medicare, resulting in stingy care for seniors.

Here's how Obamacare affects you:

Insured through work? The law forces employers to provide a one-size-fits-all benefit package costing much more than pre-Obamacare coverage. The law also imposes a slew of new taxes. No surprise, employers are offsetting these costs by raising deductibles and reducing family coverage. In 2017, many companies will eliminate insurance for spouses.

Working part-time? Hundreds of thousands of workers have had their hours cut because Obamacare requires employers to cover "full-time" employees, meaning those working 30 hours a week or more. Ironically, colleges, where Democrats outnumber Republicans, are major culprits, slashing hours for adjuncts and student workers to evade providing insurance.

Job hunting? Obamacare dampens the job market. In New York state, 17 percent of service companies and 21 percent of manufacturers are reducing their workforces to stay below 50 full-time workers and dodge the employer mandate, according to the New York Federal Reserve.

Sixty-five or over? Obamacare awards bonus points to hospitals that spend the least per senior. Researchers found that at 231 hospitals getting bonuses for low spending, seniors died needlessly because of inadequate care. For example, seniors having heart attacks were forced to wait too long for angioplasties.

Obamacare emergency room rules slap seniors with bills for "observation care." You're in the hospital, but you're not officially "admitted." It's a cost-cutting gimmick. When it's time to go home, Medicare doesn't pay and you're stuck with a huge tab.

A physician? Thank Obamacare for the thousands of pages of new regulations dictating how you treat your Medicare patients. Precious minutes that could be spent talking to a patient are wasted filling out tedious, repetitive government forms. Physicians are glued to computer screens, following prompts, instead of making eye contact with their patients and listening to them.

Refusnik? If you're uninsured and refuse to buy Obamacare, the average penalty is $995 per adult, $500 per child. Ouch.

Clinton promises voters to make Obamacare better. With billions of dollars of extra spending. But she's not going to remove the mandates causing people to lose work hours or their jobs. As for the regulations suffocating doctors, count on Clinton to pile on more.

Worst of all, Hillary Clinton wants to expand Medicare to people in their 50s. Seniors are already having a hard time finding a doctor to treat them for Medicare's low rates. Adding millions of 50-somethings trying to see the same doctors will make it impossible to get an appointment.

Trump knows Obamacare has to be junked. His plan eliminates the unaffordable mandates and penalties. Consumers will choose from wide variety of plans, sold across state lines, with special help for people with pre-existing conditions. Donald Trump gives states flexibility to improve Medicaid for the poor. His plan resembles what House Republicans are pushing, which means it might actually get passed. On Nov. 8, voters have the chance to rid this nation of Obamacare. They should seize it.

Think about it. Obama's "Hope and Change" administration was infested with moldy-oldie Clintonites from day one. They ruled the roost on hiring decisions, economic policy, health care, energy and the environment, immigration, and, of course, the State Department.

At the center of it all? John Podesta, the ultimate Beltway barnacle. He has inhabited D.C.'s chambers of power since 1979, when he served as the Senate Judiciary Committee's Democratic majority counsel. He then worked for former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle — the disgraced tax cheat who parlayed his public service into a $5.2 million personal fortune as one of Washington's biggest influence peddlers, along with his lobbyist wife.

As Slick Willie's first staff secretary, Podesta acted as chief paper-pusher, scandal patrolman and "bimbo eruption" suppression ninja. He accumulated several other policy hats, dabbling in telecom security and regulatory policy before ascending to deputy chief of staff. In the second Clinton term, he took over as chief of staff with comprehensive control over "policy development, daily operations, congressional relations, and staff activities of the White House" — along with primary influence over federal budget and tax policy, as well as privacy and national security.

It was Podesta who fielded the call near the end of the Clintons' reign in 2000 that led to the sordid pardon for Clinton donor Marc Rich. Who was it that lobbied him? His old law school pal and bestie Peter Kadzik — now the Obama DOJ assistant attorney general in charge of investigating top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin's newly discovered emails.

But I digress. With the Clintons' blessing in 2003, Podesta secured funding from billionaire subprime mortgage fat cat Herbert Sandler to create the Center for American Progress — the radical think tank at the center of the liberal universe in Washington, D.C. The Latin translation for "Center for American Progress"? Quid pro quo.

As co-chairman of Barack Obama's transition team in 2008, Podesta filled top policy lots with his think tank's staffers, including special Department of Health and Human Services assistant Michael Halle and HHS Director Jeanne Lambrew. Those Podesta minions worked under another former Clintonite, Obama's second HHS secretary, Sylvia Matthews Burwell.

Matthews Burwell was the Clinton aide who rummaged through former Hillary Clinton law partner/confidante and deputy White House counsel Vince Foster's garbage after he committed suicide. She denied taking any records belonging to Foster during her dumpster dive. But later, missing Rose Law Firm billing records tied to the complex Whitewater and Castle Grande real estate and savings and loans racket were mysteriously discovered in a private reading room of the Clinton White House. With Hillary's and Foster's prints on them.

Before there was BleachBit, Browner covered her tracks the old-fashioned way. At the Clinton EPA, she was caught ordering her computer technician to purge and delete all her files just as a federal court had ordered her to preserve any government documents related to a public records lawsuit over her regulatory favors to left-wing environmental groups.

Not only did she have computer technicians clear and reformat her hard drives, but also email backup tapes were erased and reused in violation of records preservation practices. Browner's EPA was held in contempt of court, but she escaped any legal consequences (the Clinton way!) and went on doctor data during the BP oil spill saga under Obama.

I don't care what side of the political aisle you occupy. Sixteen years of pay-for-play plunder and corruptocracy by Big Government statists masquerading as "progressives" is 16 years too many. Do you really want to keep Washington in the decrepit hands of Bill and Hill's henchpeople?

Can we long endure another four or eight more years of Clinton schlock and awfulness?

Enough is enough. Lock her up later. Lock her — and all her sleazy, money-grubbing minions — out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. now.

Michelle Malkin is a senior editor at Conservative Review. For more articles and videos from Michelle, visit ConservativeReview.com.
COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+MichelleMalkin@gmail.com (Michelle Malkin)State of AffairsWed, 02 Nov 2016 12:10:46 +0000Has Economics Failed?http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/43-taxes-and-economy/3336-has-economics-failed
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/43-taxes-and-economy/3336-has-economics-failedIt is especially painful for me, as an economist, to see that two small cities in northern California — San Mateo and Burlingame — have rent control proposals on the ballot this election year.

There are various other campaigns, in other places around the country, for and against minimum wage laws, which likewise make me wonder if the economics profession has failed to educate the public in the most elementary economic lessons.

Neither rent control nor minimum wage laws — nor price control laws in general — are new. Price control laws go back as far as ancient Egypt and Babylon, and they have been imposed at one time or other on every inhabited continent.

History alone should be able to tell us what the actual consequences of such laws have been, since they have been around for thousands of years. Anyone who has taken a course in Economics 1 should understand why those consequences have been so different from what their advocates expected. It is not rocket science.

Nevertheless, advocates of a rent control law are saying things like "this will prevent some landlords from gouging tenants and making a ton of money off the housing crisis."

The reason there is a housing crisis in the first place is that existing laws in much of California prevent enough housing from being built to supply the apartments and homes that people want. If landlords were all sweethearts, and never raised rents, that would still not get one new building built.

Rising rents are a symptom of the problem. The actual cause of the problem is a refusal of many California officials to allow enough housing to be built for all the people who want to rent an apartment.

Supply and demand is one of the first things taught in introductory economics textbooks. Why it should be a mystery to people living in an upscale community — people who have probably graduated from an expensive college — is the real puzzle. Supply and demand is not a breakthrough on the frontiers of knowledge.

A century ago, virtually any economist could have explained why preventing housing from being built would lead to higher rents, and why rent control would further widen the gap between the amount of housing supplied and the amount demanded. Not to mention such other consequences as a faster deterioration of existing housing, since upkeep gets neglected when there is a housing shortage.

Today's economists have advanced to far more complicated problems. It is as if we had the world's greatest mathematicians but most college graduates couldn't do arithmetic.

Part of the problem is that even our most prestigious colleges seldom have any real curriculum requirements that would ensure that their graduates had at least a basic understanding of economics, history, mathematics, science or other fundamental subjects.

Many students and their parents spend great amounts of money, and go into debt, for an education that too often leaves them illiterate in economics and ignorant of many other subjects.

Part of the problem is that many college graduates do not take a single course in economics. Another part of the problem is that many economics departments leave the teaching of introductory economics in the hands of some junior or transient faculty member, or even graduate students who get stuck with the job.

One of the things that made me proud of the economics department at UCLA when I taught there, decades ago, was that teaching the introductory economics course was the job of a full professor, even if not the same professor every year.

In all too many subjects today, the introductory course is taught by junior faculty, transient faculty or graduate students, while the full professors teach only upper level courses or postgraduate courses.

That may save a department the expense of staffing the introductory course with their more highly paid members. But, it is extravagantly expensive from the standpoint of society as a whole, when it means sending graduates out into the world unable to see through the wasteful economic hokum spread by politicians.

That is how you get ill-informed voters who support price controls of many kinds, without understanding that prices convey economic realities that do not change just because the government changes the prices. It is as if someone's fever was treated by putting the thermometer in cold water to bring the temperature reading down. You don't get more housing with rent control.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+ThomasSowell@gmail.com (Thomas Sowell)Taxes & EconomyTue, 01 Nov 2016 14:30:24 +0000When Will Liberals Answer for Obamacare's Failures?http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/56-health-care/3329-when-will-liberals-answer-for-obamacares-failures
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/56-health-care/3329-when-will-liberals-answer-for-obamacares-failuresThese days, there's been a lot of discussion about conservative media's culpability in creating unrealistic expectations and warped priorities among Republican voters. It's a reasonable critique. My question: When are we going to have this conversation about the other side — you know, the one that enabled the passage of a massive partisan health care reform law that's failed to deliver on almost all its promises?

No doubt, you'll remember all those romantic charts and stories from the liberal smart set predicting Obamacare's affordability and success. Remember the jeering aimed at conservatives who argued that state-run markets inhibiting genuine competition and increasing regulations would only spur costs to rise? "Lies," liberals said.

In 2014, The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne asked a valuable question: "Is there any accountability in American politics for being completely wrong?" The answer: Of course not. Not for conservative talkers — and definitely not for liberal pundits who keep modifying the meaning of success.

At the time, Dionne argued that the Affordable Care Act was doing exactly what its supporters had predicted, "getting health insurance to millions who didn't have it before." In reality, that was only one piece of Obamacare's promise, and even that accomplishment has been retroactively simplified to create an impression of unqualified success. Far from it.

Of course mandating and subsidizing health insurance will decrease the number of uninsured. Yet punditry on the left seems to be under the impression that coercing people to participate is revolutionary policymaking. Countless times in 2009, the president promised that exchanges would offer those newly insured Americans more quality "choices" and "affordability" and push down rates overall. (He promised the rest of us that health care premiums would fall by $2,500 for a family of four. Instead, they've risen by over $4,800.)

New administration data released this week find that Obamacare premiums will spike an average of 25 percent across the country for benchmark plans in 2017. Americans will be forced to forfeit plans they like or lose insurance altogether and accept a tax or fine — or whatever liberals are calling their state-enforced mandate these days.

But don't worry; consumers on exchanges will also have far fewer choices. The number of health insurance carriers in the exchanges will drop from 298 this year to 228 in 2017. In five states — Alaska, Alabama, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wyoming — there will be only one insurance company providing plans in 2017. It's one too many for many on the left.

Obamacare is working so well that Democrats are now pressuring Republicans to fix it and Hillary Clinton is arguing that to save it, we need a "public option" — a euphemism for a government-run insurance program. You can't save contrived marketplaces, because they never work. They don't work even when you allow cronyistic insurance companies to write policy. They don't work simply because technocrats massage numbers and cram them into a line chart.

Even as he was boasting about his signature achievement this past week, President Obama conceded that six years after passage, Obamacare is still experiencing "growing pains." You know, it's just like a "starter home," he said. "You hope that over time, you make some improvements."

Rest assured, those "improvements" never mean opening up markets or loosening restrictions. In other words, health care reform was exactly what many Republicans feared it would be: a way to incrementally socialize the system.

"We think they will ultimately be surprised by the affordability of the premiums, because the tax credits track with the increases in premiums," Kevin Griffis, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, reassured exchange users after the rate hikes were announced.

There are about 10 million customers who purchase their health care through HealthCare.gov and state-run offshoots. With no effective national reform in sight, that number will most likely grow. Although these consumers will have fewer choices, they will still receive financial assistance to offset the rate hikes. A spike in rates on the benchmark plans means more subsidies. Someone has to pay for what turns out to be little more than a new welfare program.

Unlike the media seers who saw Obamacare paying for itself — magically bending the cost curve in the right direction and creating vibrant pretend marketplaces that offer uninsured Americans an array of affordable choices — I can't see the future. The trajectory of the law, though, offers us two choices, broadly speaking.

Republicans could let the law die. They could then reform the health care system by allowing it to function more like every other successful market in the country — with minimal interference from politicians. Or we could all accept another giant unfunded liability, higher taxes and further socialization of our health care system. The only question will be how quickly it will happen. One thing's for sure, though. Despite all evidence, liberal cheerleaders of Obamacare will continue to act as if the law has been an awe-inspiring success.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+DavidHarsanyi@gmail.com (David Harsanyi)Health CareFri, 28 Oct 2016 05:00:00 +0000Gallup: Public Support For Police Jumps By Record Margin http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3327-gallup-public-support-for-police-jumps-by-record-margin-
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3327-gallup-public-support-for-police-jumps-by-record-margin-Imagine how it feels to walk out your door for work each morning with the ominous awareness that due to the very nature of your job, you may not ever walk back through that door again.

To be sure, unexpected tragedy can strike any one of us at any time, in any variety of ways. Very few of us, however, have jobs that by definition entail risk of death on a daily, hourly or even moment-to-moment basis.

Yet police officers face that reality every single day. It's an oftentimes thankless career, in service of a public that judging by celebrity grandstanding and media narrative doesn't seem to have their backs.

But there's actually very encouraging news to report.

According to a new Gallup survey released just this week, public respect for the nation's police officers surged by a record margin over the past calendar year:

Three in four Americans (76%) say they have 'a great deal' of respect for the police in their area, up 12 percentage points from last year. In addition to the large majority of Americans expressing 'a great deal' of respect for their local police, 17% say they have 'some' respect while 7% say they have 'hardly any.' Gallup has asked this question nine times since 1965. The percentage who say they respect the police is significantly higher now than in any measurement taken since the 1990s, and is just one point below the high of 77% recorded in 1967. Solid majorities of Americans have said they respect their local law enforcement in all polls conducted since 1965.

Paradoxically, that record surge occurs precisely while antagonists like "Black Lives Matter" protestors, rioters and celebrities like San Francisco 49ers second-string quarterback Colin Kaepernick malign police, as Gallup noted in its survey:

The sharp increase over the past year in professed respect for local law enforcement comes as many police say they feel they are on the defensive - both politically and for their lives while they are on duty - amid heated national discussions on police brutality and shootings.

Despite the popularity boomerang effect that anti-police antagonists have suffered, however, that doesn't mean their actions haven't negatively affected other institutions. According to a separate survey recently released by Rasmussen Reports, for example, Americans are tuning out the National Football League (NFL) due to the protests:

A sizable number of Americans say they may give the National Football League a pass this year, thanks to player protests over racial issues. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that nearly one-third (32%) of American adults say they are less likely to watch an NFL game because of the growing number of Black Lives Matter protests by players on the field. Only 13% say they are more likely to watch a game because of the protests.

Additionally, Rasmussen notes that the protests have had a blowback effect on the movement itself: "Part of the problem for Black Lives matter may be that only 26% think that it supports reforms to ensure that all Americans are treated fairly under the law."

Ouch. So 93% of the country expresses support toward police, whereas only 26% even agree that the Black Lives Matter movement actually supports what it claims to support.

More disturbingly, the anti-police movement has had tangible negative effects on the inner cities and minority populations.

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), homicides increased by 12% in 2015, the largest annual leap since the 1960s. Black Americans were the hardest hit, with a shocking 900 more black males dead in 2015 compared to the year prior. Just as alarming is the fact that murders of police by firearms have increased by 47% so far this year compared to last year, including a 100% increase in firearm assaults on police in Chicago.

That horrific increase comes immediately on the heels of the Ferguson, Missouri and other protests of late 2014. As Manhattan Institute Fellow Heather MacDonald observed, the riots and demonization of police have altered how they approach their jobs of serving and protecting:

Officers are second-guessing their own justified use of force for fear of being labeled racist and losing their jobs, if not their freedom. On Oct. 5 a female officer in Chicago was beaten unconscious by a suspect in a car crash, who repeatedly bashed her face into the concrete and tore out chunks of her hair. She refrained from using her gun, she said, because she didn't want to become the next viral video in the Black Lives Matter narrative.

Accordingly, the anti-police movement has had substantive effect, but not as intended.

Hopefully, however, political leaders, media voices, celebrity culture and police themselves will recognize that the general public overwhelmingly supports the nation's police officers. Not only will that at least reassure police of their value to us, it will also hopefully help reverse the alarming increase in violence that the nation has witnessed over the past year.

]]>tlee@cfif.org (Timothy H. Lee)State of AffairsThu, 27 Oct 2016 14:04:22 +0000Hillary's Climate of Hatehttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3325-hillarys-climate-of-hate
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3325-hillarys-climate-of-hateWho are the haters? Who are the autocrats? Who are the serial abusers of power?

Only one presidential candidate has wielded the sledgehammer of government against personal enemies.

Only one presidential candidate has exploited a spouse's public office to exact revenge on political dissenters.

Only one presidential candidate has a quarter-century track record of taxpayer-subsidized demagoguery and class warfare.

And as the most recent undercover investigation by James O'Keefe's Project Veritas revealed this past week, only one presidential candidate has been directly linked to a scheme to foment chaos and violence at her opponent's rallies.

Ignore the kindly grandma with the "Stronger Together" backdrop warbling about her happy family and singing the praises of diversity and inclusion. Look beyond the carefully manufactured semblance of bipartisanship and moderation.

Remember history — or rather, "herstory."

Hillary Clinton isn't just a nasty woman. She's a ruthless hatemonger devoted wholly to two corrupt pursuits while on the federal teat: tearing down and cashing in.

To clueless millennials, "bimbo eruptions" might sound like a Trumpism. But it was vintage Team Hillary's misogynistic moniker for horndog Slick Willie's accuser outbreaks in the 1990s.

Respect for women? This is the snarling elitist who attacked Gennifer Flowers, a paramour of her cheating husband, as a "failed cabaret singer" whom she would verbally "crucify" if she had the chance.

Just how vindictive can Crooked Grandma be? Ask the people who know her best. David Watkins, a former top administrative aide from Arkansas in the Clinton administration, laid out the then-first lady's central role in the crony-motivated White House travel office firings.

The Clinton's old pal, Hollywood producer Harry Thomason, had pushed for wholesale dismissal of travel office staff in favor of their connected friends.

"We both know that there would be hell to pay," Watkins informed Chief of Staff Thomas McLarty if "we failed to take swift and decisive action in conformity with the First Lady's wishes."

Indeed, Hill unleashed hell. Watkins was sacked under the guise of punishment for using a government helicopter as transportation to a golfing event — something that's a privilege for presidents, not peons.

He was far from alone. Bill and Hill's IRS (two for the price of one, don't forget) targeted conservative think tanks and nonprofits. Bill and Hill's FBI improperly and illegally accessed the files of countless citizens who inconveniently ruined the Clinton narrative.

And the woman who just weeks ago mauled millions of Trump supporters nationwide as "irredeemable" and "deplorable" is a pro at sweeping demonizations.

Remember: She made a name for herself attacking life-saving drug companies as greedy profiteers in the 1990s, even as she and her husband raked in their campaign donations.

Money-grubbers never change. While walloping drug companies again last year, she took more money from the nation's top-15 largest pharmaceutical firms than all the other GOP candidates combined.

The two-faced, split-tongued politician who mocked Trump for calling out America's rigged system came to power decrying the "vast right-wing conspiracy" to deflect from that blue dress her husband stained. She's a menace to alternate media, to entrepreneurs, to honest, hard-working people, to the rule of law, public safety and national security.

When you tune out the manufactured noise and distractions, when you ignore the media squirrels and engineered scuffles, when you rip up the gender card and contemplate nearly 25 years of the politics of personal destruction and private enrichment — not to mention the standalone disqualifying scandals of Benghazi, Emailgate and the WikiLeaks disclosures — the choice should not be difficult.

You can take a gamble on the imperfect businessman who has never held public office. Or you can go with the guaranteed continuation of Hillary Clinton's entrenched climate of hate and culture of corruption. Left, right or center, if you are opposed to Clintonian history repeating itself, you'll take your chances with Trump. I am.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+MichelleMalkin@gmail.com (Michelle Malkin)State of AffairsWed, 26 Oct 2016 13:44:57 +0000Immigration Controversieshttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/58-immigration/3328-immigration-controversies
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/58-immigration/3328-immigration-controversiesDespite controversies that rage over immigration, it is hard to see how anyone could be either for or against immigrants in general. First of all, there are no immigrants in general.

Both in the present and in the past, some immigrant groups have made great contributions to American society, and others have contributed mainly to the welfare rolls and the prisons. Nor is this situation unique to the United States. The same has been true of Sweden and of other countries in Europe and elsewhere.

Sweden was, for a long time, one of the most ethnically homogeneous countries in the world. As of 1940, only about one percent of the Swedish population were immigrants. Even as the proportion of immigrants increased over the years, as late as 1970 90 percent of foreign-born persons in Sweden had been born in other Scandinavian countries or in Western Europe.

These immigrants were usually well-educated, and often had higher labor force participation rates and lower unemployment rates than the native Swedes. That all began to change as the growing number of immigrants came increasingly from the Middle East, with Iraqis becoming the largest immigrant group in Sweden.

This changing trend was accompanied by a sharply increased use of the government's "social assistance" program, from 6 percent in the pre-1976 era to 41 percent in the 1996-1999 period. But, even in this later period, fewer than 7 percent of the immigrants from Scandinavia and Western Europe used "social assistance," while 44 percent of the immigrants from the Middle East used that welfare state benefit.

Immigrants, who were by this time 16 percent of Sweden's population, had become 51 percent of the long-term unemployed and 57 percent of the people receiving welfare payments. The proportion of foreigners in prison was 5 times their proportion in the population of the country.

The point of all this is that there is no such thing as immigrants in general, whether in Europe or America. Yet all too many of the intelligentsia in the media and in academia talk as if immigrants were abstract people in an abstract world, to whom we could apply abstract principles — such as "we are all descendants of immigrants."

A hundred years ago, when a very different mix of immigrants were coming to a very different America, there was a huge, multi-volume study of how immigrants from different countries had fared here. This included how they did as workers in various industries and in agriculture, and how their children did in school.

Some people like to refer to the past as "earlier and simpler times." But it is we today who are so simple-minded that it would be taboo to do anything so politically incorrect as to sort out immigrants by what country they came from. As Hillary Clinton said in one of her recently revealed e-mails, she is for "open borders."

However congenial the idea of open borders may be to elites who think of themselves as citizens of the world, it is not even possible to have everyone come to America and the country still remain America.

What is it that makes this country so different that so many people from around the world have, for centuries, wanted to come here, more so than to any other country? It is not the land or the climate, neither of which is so different from the land and the climate in many other places.

Nor is it the racial makeup of the country, which consists of races found on other continents. What is unique are American institutions, American culture and American economic and other achievements within that framework.

People who came here a hundred years ago usually did so in order to fit within the framework of America and become Americans. Some still do. But many come from a very different cultural background — and our own multiculturalism dogmas and grievance industry work to keep them foreign and resentful of Americans who have achieved more than they have.

Some immigrant groups seek to bring to America the very cultures whose failures led them to flee to this country. Not all individual immigrants and not all immigrant groups. But too many Americans have become so gullible that they are afraid to even get the facts about which immigrants have done well and improved America, and which have become a burden that can drag us all down.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+ThomasSowell@gmail.com (Thomas Sowell)ImmigrationTue, 25 Oct 2016 15:07:56 +0000Hillary Clinton's Dishonesty Was on Display in Final Debatehttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3322-hillary-clintons-dishonesty-was-on-display-in-final-debate
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/3322-hillary-clintons-dishonesty-was-on-display-in-final-debateThe third and mercifully final presidential debate also turned out to be the most conventional. Fox News' Chris Wallace did a solid job pressing the candidates on issues in Las Vegas, giving them space to spar but not enough space to get out of control.

Of course, not even a strong moderator will deter candidates from misleading, lying and prevaricating all night. And since we know Trump's performance will be comprehensively fact-checked by the entire media, let's talk about three of Clinton's biggest whoppers.

First, was there anything more ridiculous in the debate than Clinton's answer on guns? When pressed by Wallace to explain her opposition to the 2008 landmark District of Columbia v. Heller decision, Clinton went through a checklist of platitudes before saying, "You mentioned the Heller decision, and what I was saying that you reference, Chris, was that I disagreed with the way the court applied the Second Amendment in that case because what the District of Columbia was trying to do was protect toddlers from guns."

Clinton brought up "toddlers" a few more times because little children are mostly adorable and no one wants to see them shot. The thing is, the Heller case revolves around Richard Heller, the then-66-year-old police officer in Washington, D.C., who was allowed to carry a gun in a federal office building to protect politicians and strangers but not in his home to protect himself, his family or his property. Also of note, the Heller decision had nothing to do with toddlers or saving toddlers' lives or toddler gun safety or toddlers shooting at one another. As my colleague Sean Davis has pointed out, the word "toddler" doesn't appear anywhere in either the majority or dissenting opinions in the case.

After she was done fearmongering, Clinton went on to say, "there's no doubt that I respect the Second Amendment, that I also believe there's an individual right to bear arms."

No, she does not. Heller ended the "total ban on handguns" in Washington, D.C. — which was the Supreme Court's description of the gun control laws in the district. It codified the Second Amendment as an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense. Clinton admits she supports an effective ban on all handguns (for the toddlers), which is what instigated Heller. What application of the decision does she oppose, if not the individual's right to own a gun?

Let's move to the only constitutional "right" Clinton believes shouldn't have any constraints: abortion. Last night, Clinton reiterated her support for legal abortion on demand for any reason throughout the entire pregnancy. Although Clinton is free to hold this position, she's not free to make stuff up.

For starters, the idea that Clinton — the woman who, in 2008, argued that President Obama's health care plans were too modest — wants to keep government out of health care decisions is worthy of 8,000 Pinocchios. While one hopes that those who are anti-abortion remain sensitive to the heartbreaking, painful decisions women make, Clinton's insinuation that most late-term abortions are to save the life of the mother is not backed up by evidence.

Dr. Leroy Carhart, nationally known for performing late-term abortions, was taped admitting that he often performs elective late-term abortions at 26 weeks "or more." Dr. Martin Haskell, the pioneer of partial-birth abortion, was once taped acknowledging that 80 percent of partial-birth abortions are "purely elective."

The evidence comports with Haskell's claim. The anti-abortion Charlotte Lozier Institute, using data from medical literature and late-term abortion providers, found that the majority of late-term abortions are not performed for "maternal health complications or lethal fetal anomalies discovered late in pregnancy." The pro-choice Guttmacher Institute found that in "many ways, women who had later abortions were similar to those who obtained first-trimester procedures." Which is to say the decision's based on convenience, not health.

Though Clinton acknowledges that Roe v. Wade allows for some limits on abortion, she has never supported a single one. Today, the health exemption is being used to end the life of a viable fetus for nearly any reason at all.

These kinds of deceits have long been a part of the culture wars. But I was a bit taken aback by Clinton's, dare I say, Trumpian dishonesty on economics. For instance, she said, word for word, "I also will not add a penny to the debt."

Clinton could tax the wealthy at a 90 percent top-marginal rate, raise rates on corporations and enact every other trickle-down tax on consumers she desires, and there's still no way she would not add to the national debt. If she failed to enact her agenda and did absolutely nothing as president (we should be so lucky), Clinton would still add to the debt. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which accepts her economic plan on its face, estimates that her policies would cost $200 billion and cause public debt to rise from over $14 trillion to more than $23 trillion over the next decade.

Like me, you might find this estimate implausibly low. But even in the fantastical world of contemporary progressive economics, $200 billion is a lot more than a "penny." Like many of the contentions we heard in Las Vegas, it was a lie peddled for political purposes.

Candidate Obama of 2008, as one example, promised to elevate America's global standing with his "citizen of the world" speeches and Berlin rallies. Today, however, there's no spot on the globe where America stands stronger and more respected than we did eight years ago. Even the Russians whom Obama kindly offered "more flexibility" should he win reelection responded by brazenly hacking American systems and interfering in our elections, according to liberals themselves.

Candidate Obama of 2008, as another example, promised improvement in American racial relations. Today, however, opinion surveys reveal record levels of pessimism, with 60% stating that racial divisions are actually worse today than when Obama was elected eight years ago.

Candidate Obama of 2008 also ridiculously promised to heal the planet and halt the oceans' rise. Today, however, global warming alarmists' doomsday pronouncements have only grown more shrill and apocalyptic than ever.

But perhaps worst of all is an Obama failure that is subject to easy quantification and objective comparison to his predecessors: his federal budget deficit record.

For years throughout the Bush Administration, one couldn't escape incessant media discussion of deficits, and Obama himself labeled Bush "unpatriotic" while campaigning in 2008:

The problem is, that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents, number 43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back - $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That's irresponsible. It's unpatriotic.

Bear in mind that when Obama leveled that charge, the most recent budget deficit was merely $161 billion.

Fast-forward to the present, as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just released its revised estimate of the fiscal 2016 deficit:

The federal government ran a budget deficit of $588 billion in fiscal year 2016, the Congressional Budget Office estimates - $149 billion greater than the shortfall recorded in fiscal year 2015. The 2016 deficit equaled an estimated 3.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), up from 2.5 percent of GDP in 2015... By CBO's estimate, revenues were less than 1 percent higher and outlays were about 5 percent higher in 2016 than they were in the previous fiscal year.

That last sentence is the bureaucratic way of saying that even though incoming revenues continued to increase, the deficit soared because spending jumped by an even higher 5%.

Regardless, let's put Obama's latest deficit in perspective.

The approximately $150 billion increase in this year's deficit is almost as much as the entire $161 billion Bush deficit that Obama considered "unpatriotic."

Even more alarming, this year's $588 billion deficit exceeds the $564 billion that we spent on national defense. If posting a deficit that exceeds military spending isn't "unpatriotic," then what is?

Moreover, we can now fairly compare Bush's complete deficit record to Obama's, and it's not a kind comparison for Obama.

Over his tenure, Bush presided over a surplus of $127 billion in 2001, then deficits of $158 billion in 2002, $378 billion in 2003, $413 billion in 2004, $318 billion in 2005, $248 billion in 2006, $161 billion in 2007 and $459 billion in 2008. So over Bush's eight years, his total was approximately $2 trillion.

Obama's record dwarfs Bush's allegedly "unpatriotic" tally. Under Obama, we saw deficits of $1.413 trillion in 2009, $1.294 trillion in 2010, $1.299 trillion in 2011, $1.1 trillion in 2012, $680 billion in 2013, $492 billion in 2014, $435 billion in 2015 and now $588 billion. That amounts to an accumulated total of over $7 trillion under Obama.

So Bush averaged deficits of approximately $250 billion, whereas Obama averaged deficits of approximately $900 billion. And as the CBO just announced, the situation is only getting worse.

It all adds up to one of the most dangerous and underreported failures of the Obama years, and there have been many. Whether attributable to media bias, public disinterest, the political left's ability to spin or some combination thereof, it's a reality that the American electorate had better recognize and address soon.

]]>tlee@cfif.org (Timothy H. Lee)State of AffairsThu, 20 Oct 2016 13:56:27 +0000Debate Depressive Disorderhttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/59-media-issues/3316-debate-depressive-disorder
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/59-media-issues/3316-debate-depressive-disorderHow many more broadcast bust-ups will it take before America finally decides to make its presidential election debates tolerable again? I can't take it anymore. Can you?

For the past three cycles — 2008, 2012, and 2016 — I've chronicled the depressing, systemic bias of left-leaning partisans whom the Commission on Presidential Debates routinely installs as "moderators." It would be one thing if these activists posing as journalists were upfront about their political preferences. But they continue to star in phony debate theater wearing their dime-store costumes of objectivity.

The even bigger farce? Masochistic Republican Party bosses let them get away with it year after year after year.

Note to President Obama: This is not "whining." This is truth-telling. I find it rather rich that the complainer-in-chief who spent two terms incessantly attacking Fox News and conservative talk radio is now wagging his waggy-licious finger at anyone else who bears grievances against hostile media and its enablers.

In 2008, the Commission on Presidential Debates allowed liberal PBS anchor Gwen Ifill to serve as unfettered moderator for the sole vice presidential debate. As I reported at the time, Ifill had failed to disclose before the event that she had a book coming out on Jan. 20, 2009 — a date that just happens to coincide with the inauguration of the next president of the United States — titled "Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama." The promotional material left no question about Ifill's perspective. She hyped Obama's campaign as "stunning" and marveled at his "bold new path to political power." She also used her access to author a hagiographic pop culture piece for Essence magazine about the Obama family.

When asked to respond to criticism about her ideological and financial conflicts of interest, Ifill acted like a true-blue leftist and played the race card.

This year's vice presidential debate "moderator" didn't fare much better. Billed as a "historic" choice because of her Filipino heritage, Elaine Quijano was a historic doormat for Clinton's babbling running mate, Tim Kaine. Her media cheerleaders, led by The New York Times' Nick Kristof, naturally invoked the gender card to defend her embarrassing passivity.

Another "diversity" moderator, Telemundo celebrity journalist Maria Celeste Arraras, known as "the Katie Couric of Spanish TV," soaked up nearly half a CNN GOP primary debate earlier this year representing "the Latino community" on issues such as Puerto Rico's bankruptcy.

2012, of course, was the year of Bitter Candy — CNN's Candy Crowley. She notoriously injected herself into the second debate (a town hall debate that was supposed to spotlight citizens' questions) by arguing with then-GOP nominee Mitt Romney about Benghazi and running interference for Obama.

Crowley was just the latest Democratic plant at a CNN-sponsored election debate. The network has a long history of passing off partisan operatives as "ordinary people" and "undecided voters" during town halls while failing to disclose their political affiliations to viewers. Moreover, there's no telling how many CNN contributors are acting as moles for Democratic campaigns. We know of at least one. This week, CNN host Jake Tapper was forced to admit that a WikiLeaks-published email showing CNN contributor and DNC head Donna Brazile had tipped off the Clinton campaign in advance to town hall questions was "horrifying."

And four years ago, we also endured the spectacle of Clinton adviser-turned-ABC newsman George Stephanopoulos pushing the Democrats' "war on women" propaganda by pressing Republicans on a nonsense contraceptive ban.

Yet, the debate commission and the Republican National Committee keep drawing from the same tainted well of cloistered media personalities. Establishment journos Anderson Cooper of CNN and Martha Raddatz of ABC News were repeat moderators this year — with disastrous results. Raddatz, another left-wing PBS alumna and Beltway fixture, created her own bitter Candy moment at the second presidential debate last week when she lost her marbles over Syria and scrapped with Donald Trump over Syria. He was right to call the townhall charade a "one on three" battle.

Actually, "one on three" is not quite accurate. As the Center for Public Integrity revealed this week, a whopping 96 percent of the nearly $400,000 in presidential campaign donations from "people identified in federal campaign finance filings as journalists, reporters, news editors or television news anchors — as well as other donors known to be working in journalism" has gone to Hillary Clinton.

Denial ain't just a river in Egypt. It's the fuel that sustains the Fourth Estate's undeserved superiority complex and monopoly over the debates. What would be so wrong with allowing open, transparent, informed partisan journalists from all sides of the political aisle a bite at the presidential debate apple? Abandon the pretenses. Put all the ideological cards on the table. Make the debates honest and tolerable again.